Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud

Leaving Parnassus The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud

FAUX TITRE 296 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Leaving Parnassus The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud

Seth Whidden

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2007

Illustration cover: Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-4). Photo : Graydon Wood. © Philadelphia Museum of Art: The George W. Elkins Collection, 1936. Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2210-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

7 9 17

Chapter Two: Verlaine’s Identities Melancholia The Love-Struck Subject Verlaine’s Poetics of Indecision After the Fall; or, The Subject, the Sacred, and the Profane Favorite Positions Toward an Aesthetic of Decay

45 52 69 75 92 107 115

Chapter Three: Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space “la poésie objective” “le dérèglement de tous les sens” Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Verse Poetry Derniers vers: Pushing Limits, Stretching Out On “Mémoire” Time and Space, Illuminated Hortense Found, in Time Mouvement

119 122 125 131 138 168 179 183 194

Conclusion

207

Bibliography Index

211 225

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without exceptional generosity from many; in the process of researching and writing it I have amassed a debt I will likely never fully repay. Parts of chapter two appeared in earlier versions in Revue Verlaine; similarly, earlier versions of portions of chapter three were published in Lire Rimbaud: Approches critiques; Parade sauvage; and Actes du colloque de Charleville de 2004. All are published here with permission and with the grateful thanks of the author. Some friends and colleagues will find their names below; I hope that those whose names do not appear will understand that listing everyone on whom I have relied would create a book at least as long as the one you are currently reading (to say nothing of what that book’s index might look like). Thanks to Jan Rigaud, whose friendship has helped to make going to the office a pleasure. Similar gratitude goes to Lee Abraham, Jean Lutes, Charles Muskiet, Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Carlos Trujillo, and Béatrice Waggaman. It’s hard to imagine how one person could excel at simultaneously being a student, colleague, editor, mentor, and friend, but Jody Ross does it all, and with grace. The Dean’s office of Villanova’s College of Arts and Sciences granted me sabbatical leave to finish my manuscript; I shudder to think of what state it would still be in without that precious time away from the office. Christa Stevens and her colleagues at Rodopi have made working on this book so easy and enjoyable that I never grew sick of it. The cover artwork, Paul Cézanne’s stunning Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-4), appears courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was made available by generous funding from Villanova’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Numerous colleagues have received unsolicited requests for information, sometimes at inopportune moments; and yet, all rose to the occasion and answered the call, without fail. Present from the very

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beginning, Marie-Chantal Killeen continues to be an infinite source of warmth, friendship, and inspiration. Steve Murphy always replies, often within seconds, with an endless supply of kindness and encouragement, and usually with more information than I can process; many thanks to him for his generosity of time, thoughts, and office space. Yann Frémy helped with part of the Rimbaud chapter; ours has become a great working partnership. Sharon Johnson and Richard Shryock offered wonderful home cooking and friendly advice at a crucial juncture in the Verlaine chapter. David Powell pored over an early version of this manuscript; thanks to his scrupulous attention to detail, this is a much better book. Each of them in their own way, Dennis Minahen, Adrianna Paliyenko, and Gretchen Schultz are models of the kind of scholar I constantly strive to be. On separate occasions, Cathy Nesci and Roger Little brightened entire months on end with extremely encouraging unsolicited comments following conference presentations; their kindness will never be forgotten. Finally, I would not be able to answer Bill Thomas’s patented existential question without him bringing me here in the first place. My parents and my sister have made it their business to follow a field of study about which they had previously known nothing; my success would be hollow if I couldn’t share it with them. Home away from home was provided, sometimes with no advance notice but always with a smile, by Chris and Cynthia Gorton; Hervé Hilaire; and Keith Martin and Eric de Gaudemont. College and grad school buddies, friends, and colleagues have all helped me enjoy my work in its proper context. Lastly, thanks to my good friends and neighbors on Cliff Island, Maine, the best place in the world to walk, think, read, write, swim, and fight fires. My children Carter and Posey have done precious little to help this book along; to the contrary, they gave me every possible reason to put it aside and spend more time with them. I can only hope that they appreciate how hard it was to say no – those times that I was able to do so – and that they see this book as proof that I was making good use of my time away from them. More than anyone else, this book is for R. Reed Whidden. S.W.

Introduction

At the heart of this study of nineteenth-century French poetry lie questions fundamental to the entire genre of poetry. Despite varying degrees of success for the epic and the dramatic, French poetry of the nineteenth century was largely dominated by the lyric. Originally the medium through which a poet expressed innermost emotions, the lyric became synonymous with its subjective point of view. As Hegel explained: The content of a lyric work of art […] must be the individual person and therefore with all the details of his situation and concerns, as well as the way in which his mind with its subjective judgment, its joy, admiration, grief, and, in short, its feeling comes to consciousness of itself in and through such experiences.1

But an art form from a subject who sings (hence the “lyre” in “lyric”), and who sings a very personal song, has clear limits: namely, the emotional limits of its poet/source. Those who look for poetry to transcend individual experience and to speak to larger universals of the human condition voice disappointment similar to the one expressed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy: [...] we know the subjective artist only as a bad artist, and throughout the whole of art we demand above all else the conquest of the subjective, release from the “self,” and the silencing of all individual will and craving; indeed we cannot imagine a truly artistic creation, however unimportant, without objectivity, without a pure and disinterested contemplation. For this reason our aesthetic must first resolve the problem of how it is possible to consider the “lyric poet” as an artist: he who, in the experience of all ages, always says “I” and sings to us through the full chromatic scale of his passions and desires.2

1

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume II. Trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1113. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 1993), 28.

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In addition to the negative reaction that the effusiveness of traditional subjective poetry generated, the inherent limitations of language to express accurately one’s emotions created a palpable, unavoidable tension. All writers felt this struggle, but few expressed it as eloquently as nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson: “[…] nous échouons à traduire entièrement ce que notre âme ressent: la pensée demeure incommensurable avec le langage” [we fail to translate entirely that which our soul feels: thought remains incommensurable with language].3 The questions that poets attempt to answer are the same: How can one express oneself and express true feelings in and through a language that only limits expression according to subjective interpretations of each word? How can a person be truly understood, given these linguistic limitations? For Bergson, language is an endless series of compromises between language and the feelings and thoughts that it approximates: […] nos perceptions, sensations, émotions et idées se présentent sous un double aspect: l’un net, précis, mais impersonnel; l’autre confus, infiniment mobile, et inexprimable, parce que le langage ne saurait le saisir sans en fixer la mobilité, ni l’adapter à sa forme banale sans le faire tomber dans le domaine commun.4 [our perceptions, sensations, emotions, and ideas are presented in two ways: one clear, precise, but impersonal; the other confused, infinitely mobile, and inexplicable, because language can not seize it without fixing its mobility, nor adapt it to its banal form without watching it fall into the common domain.]

Bergson was hardly alone in his observations, and this line of investigation is by no means limited to speakers of French; as Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1926) wrote in his Letter of Lord Chandos: […] the language in which I might be able not only to write but also to think is […] a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day justify myself before an unknown judge.5

3

Henri Bergson, Œuvres, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959), 109. Translations are mine unless indication to the contrary. 4 Bergson 85-86. 5 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Letter of Lord Chandos,” Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 141.

Introduction

11

The poets who followed Romanticism thus inherited a poetic tradition in which the role of the lyric subject and its language were questioned. This avenue of inquiry into what is commonly called the crisis of the lyric subject has been the focus of important critical studies in recent years.6 As Dominique Rabaté has explained, the lyric subject is a constant source of tension, stuck in a state of flux and slipping back and forth between the “je” in the poet’s mind – represented on the page – and the “je” as it is received by the reader: Cette tension, qui ne se résout pas en une dialectique, fait ainsi porter l’accent sur l’instabilité de ce sujet: le sujet lyrique en question, c’est-à-dire ce sujet comme question, comme inquiétude, comme force de déplacement. Le sujet lyrique n’est donc pas à entendre comme un donné qui s’exprime selon un certain langage, la langue changée en chant, mais comme un procès, une quête d’identité.7 [This tension, which is not resolved in a dialectic, thus puts the emphasis on the instability of this subject, the lyric subject in question, that is to say this subject as question, as worry, as force of displacement. The lyric subject should thus not be understood as a given expressed according to a certain language, a language changed into chant, but as a process, a search for identity.]

Rather than trace the path of this tension throughout nineteenthcentury French poetry, studies of the crisis of the lyric consider not only language’s inherent shortcomings but also the impact of those limitations on the stability of the lyric subject. It is useful to discuss just a few of these semiotic approaches for, while they are not the central focus of this study, they do inform our understanding of the complexity of the poetic subject’s expression in and through language. For Julia Kristeva, the lyric subject becomes “un individu éclaté, passage à la limite du moi: à la limite de la synthèse logicosyntaxique” [an exploded individual, a passage to the limits of self: to the limits of logic-syntactic synthesis].8

6

See Dominique Rabaté, ed. Figures du sujet lyrique; Dominique Rabaté, Joëlle de Sermet, and Yves Vadé, eds. Modernités 8: Le sujet lyrique en question; and Nathalie Watteyne, ed., Lyrisme et énonciation lyrique (see bibliography for complete information). 7 Dominique Rabaté, “Énonciation poétique, énonciation lyrique,” Figures du sujet lyrique, ed. Rabaté (Paris: Presses universitaires de France / “Perspectives littéraires,” 1996), 66; original emphasis. 8 Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 466.

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This tug of war between the poetic subject and its language is particularly prominent in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century, as Julia Kristeva explains: “[…] la transformation du langage poétique à la fin du XIXe siècle consiste précisément en ce qu’il devient une pratique [d’une] dialectique du sujet dans le langage” [the transformation of poetic language at the end of the nineteenth century consists precisely in that it becomes a practice of a dialectic of the subject in language].9 Kristeva’s reflections on poetic language, while directed more at symbolist poetry, interest the present study because they are just as applicable to certain aspects of Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s poetic projects. In the opposition between what she refers to as the symbolic and the semiotic, Kristeva defines two fields of expression: the first, representing everyday transparent linguistic expression which is of the order of the sign; the second is a poetic expression that surpasses the limits of the former and destabilizes language’s referential function. It is precisely language’s destabilizing potential that will interest us in this study; the poet troubles the existing order in exploiting in a new way the discursive figures that go beyond everyday language.10 Another useful approach to language comes from Henri Meschonnic, for whom the practices of signifying are as important as the signification itself (if not more so). Like Kristeva, he privileges aspects of language that are beyond the realm of the sign, and he gives particular emphasis to rhythm: “le primat du rythme, dans la signifiance, avec tout ce qu’elle comporte d’infralinguistic, de transsémiotique (débordant le signe), il me semble que ce sont ces éléments qui font la relation spécifique du rythme au poème” [the 9

Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 81. While Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic is useful in a discussion of post-romantic poetry because it goes beyond transparent signification, there is an important distinction between her approach and the one undertaken in this study: the anteriority of the semiotic vis-à-vis the symbolic. For Kristeva, the semiotic resides in a maternal space of free expression, existing before the entrance into paternal language, through which all expressions are forever mediated (and are thus manipulated). While her theory is certainly interesting in its capacity to create a space of expression outside the dominant forces of the symbolic, this study distances itself from the notion of an anterior “first” language, since such an approach emphasizes the psychological and brings into play other aspects – including the origins of expression – that are too tangential to the present work to be pursued here. 10

Introduction

13

primacy of rhythm, in significance, with everything infralinguistic and transsemiotic (going beyond the sign) that it brings with it, it seems to me that these are the elements that make the specific relationship from rhythm to the poem].11 It is precisely in the rhythm of a poem, what Meschonnic defines as “mouvement de la parole, mouvement du sujet dan son langage” [movement of speech, movement of the subject in its language]12, that we can find poetry’s specificity. However, instead of limiting rhythm to versification, Meschonnic goes further, considering rhythm as an integral part of all literature, linking meaning and form in all kinds of linguistic expression. Of course, rhythm remains a key element of poetry because it is “ce qu’il y a du plus inaudible dans le règne du sens” [that which is the most inaudible in the reign of meaning]13 and because it retains the link between the lyric and its oral tradition, central to Meschonnic’s writings. Informed by these approaches to the crisis of the lyric subject in nineteenth-century French poetry, this study focuses on that crisis as it is played out, and as can be organized along thematic lines, in the works of two poets of the second half of the century: Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Both poets react to Parnassian poetry, “ce culte de la rime riche” [this cult of rich rhyme]14, a consensus of poetic approaches that grew out of the publication of the three volumes of Le parnasse contemporain. While Parnassian poetry was “un groupement jeune, l’expression d’une génération nouvelle” [a young grouping, the expression of a new generation]15, it was marked by a return to classical prosodic forms and in general a heightened respect for the rules that govern them: Ce souci esthétique qui caractérise le Parnasse, se manifeste chez les nouveaux venus par un respect accru des ‘règles’ prosodiques et par un retour à des formes fixes qu’avaient abandonnées ou méprisées les romantiques, exceptés quelques ‘marginaux’ comme Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Nerval.16 11

Meschonnic, “Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?” Langue française 56 (Dec. 1982), 10. Meschonnic, “Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?” 20. 13 Meschonnic, La rime et la vie (Paris: Verdier, 1989), 20-21. 14 Pierre Martino, Parnasse et symbolisme (1850-1900), 3rd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1930), 27. 15 Luc Decaunes, ed. La poésie parnassienne: De Gautier à Rimbaud (Paris: Seghers, 1977), 7. 16 Decaunes 14; see Chapter One of this study for a more involved discussion of the tenets of Parnassian poetry. 12

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[The aesthetic concern that characterized le Parnasse manifested itself in the works of the new arrivals in a heightened respect for prosodic “rules” and by a return to the fixed forms that the Romantics – with the exception of a few “marginals” like Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Nerval – had abandoned or despised.]

For both Verlaine and Rimbaud, the destabilized situation of the lyric subject is a direct response to and reaction against the traditional modes of subject/object relations that characterized Parnassian poetry. This study’s three parts pursue the lines of questioning opened here. The first chapter, “The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry,” examines how Parnassian poetry was a direct refutation of the Romantic notion of the social utility of poetry as seen in Alphonse de Lamartine’s poems. In stating that “tout ce qui est utile est laid” [“all that is useful is ugly”]17, Théophile Gautier helped develop the Parnassian credo of l’art pour l’art [“art for art’s sake”] which considered the depiction of beauty in its many forms as the only valid aesthetic. Most studies of literary history give Parnassian poetry short shrift, especially once the advent of Symbolism arrived in 1886. However, this first chapter shows that, while Parnassian poetry has perhaps lost favor among twentieth-century scholars, it was a much more dominant presence than most scholars have traditionally accepted, and poets throughout the late 1880s and mid 1890s were still trying to shake the confines of le Parnasse. Even after Symbolism’s official manifesto, poets continued to respond to Parnassian poetry of earlier decades, suggesting that its dominant lyric subject enjoyed a long and enduring presence during much of the last forty years of the century. As a result, many poets of the 1860s and 1870s wrote in the shadow of this Mount Parnassus. For some, like the two studied here, their departure from Parnassian poetry marked the first step in a direction that would prove to be a fundamental aspect of their poetics, spanning their entire work. In this regard, the influence of

17

Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Adolphe Boschot (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1955), 23. “Most scholars agree that the first reference to l’art pour l’art is in a work by the philosopher Victor Cousin, Questions esthétiques et religieuses (1818), in which he says that art is not enrolled in the service of religion and morals or in the service of what is pleasing and useful” (Wallace Fowlie, Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990], 2).

Introduction

15

Parnassian poetry on Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s poems can hardly be overstated. “Verlaine’s Identities” shows the extent to which Verlaine’s poetry is based on a constantly evolving search for poetic subjectivity. In each collection, the search is redefined, and the lyric subject adopts a new role to play, each time framed within the context of a couple. After his Parnassian phase of the 1860s, he turns to writing the love struck subject addressing his beloved in Fêtes galantes and in La Bonne Chanson. No longer under the influence of Saturn as he was in his collection Poèmes saturniens, Verlaine’s poems in Romances sans paroles are greatly influenced by the Rimbaud’s poetry, and his poetic subject is on the brink of collapse. The devout and reborn poet of Sagesse is in constant conversation with God, only to lead to the debauched subject of Verlaine’s final erotic collections, which explore the imaginable relationships of power and positions through the blurring of roles in sexual and poetic role-playing. Here, Verlaine’s subject’s search for self – what Arnaud Bernadet has termed Verlaine’s “theater of individuality”18 – is not biographical but rather an aesthetic stance that is repeated, with slight variations, during each phase of Verlaine’s literary production. The tensions surrounding the lyric subject do not reflect Verlaine’s biography but are a poetic construct. A clear break from the tradition of Verlaine studies that has far too often muddied the boundaries between life and work not only permits his poems to be studied more seriously, without the hindrance of irrelevant biography, but also forges a clear and promising path for future studies into the role of the lyric subject in Verlaine’s poetry. The third part, entitled “Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space,” takes as its point of departure a famous passage from Rimbaud’s correspondence, in which he states that the poet arrives at the unknown by “le dérèglement de tous les sens” [the derangement of all the senses]. Here the French word “sens” is interpreted in all its myriad possibilities: senses, meanings, and directions, all definitions proposed by dictionaries of the period. In order to question lyric poetry as represented by the Parnassian model, Rimbaud explodes not only the lyric subject’s categories of sensory perception but also the very markers that define the subject’s existence: namely, time and space. Subjectiv18

Arnaud Bernadet, “‘Être poète lyrique et vivre de son état’: Fragments d’une théorie de l’individuation chez Verlaine,” Revue Verlaine 7-8 (2002), 85.

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ity is inextricably linked to the its temporal and spatial situation, and Emile Benveniste saw this link as manifesting itself in language as well: Il est aisé de voir que le domaine de la subjectivité s’agrandit encore et doit s’annexer l’expression de la temporalité. Quel que soit le type de langue, on constate partout une certaine organisation linguistique de la notion de temps.19 [It is easy to see that the domain of subjectivity grows greater still and must include the expression of temporality. In whatever kind of language it might be, we see that everywhere there is a certain linguistic organization of the notion of time.]

By troubling conventional notions of time, Rimbaud destabilizes human existence, always situated somewhere along the axis of time from the very onset of the cogito. When neat categories of past, present, and future become blurred, and history is no longer linear, how do we situate our stories? How do we situate ourselves? Such are the questions raised by Rimbaud’s refusal of a traditional and linear chronology. Readings of poems throughout his brief career situate several existing critical studies of Rimbaud’s bending of time in Illuminations20 within a larger context and show how the crisis of the lyric subject that dominates French poetry of the second half of the century can be traced along the axes of time and space. This study concludes by considering how the lyric subject in crisis in the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine is different from that of their Symbolist contemporaries, and how these issues of subjectivity influence the reception of their work by future generations of critics and scholars. While many other poets were able to break free from the Parnassian mold, it continued to define the developing Symbolist movement throughout the 1880s and 1890s, and as such it deserves more attention from critics for the major role it played in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century.

19

Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale. Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard / Tel, 1966), 262. 20 See for example Gerald Macklin, “The Reinvention of Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Illuminations,” Nottingham French Studies 35.2 (Autumn 1996), 60-75.

Chapter One The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

Before considering the situation of Parnassian poetry – and perhaps its underestimated dominance – it is useful to recall the basic origins and themes for which le Parnasse came to be known. As the words Parnasse and Parnassus suggest, the poetry grouped into the three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain: recueil de vers nouveaux inhabited Mount Parnassus, mythological home of the Muses and, more generally, of poetry. With this return to mythology came a neoclassical turn away from their own era: roughly 1860 to 1880. They similarly rejected the social utility of poetry that had come to characterize the 1830s and that had perhaps seen its symbolic apotheosis in 1848, when Romantic sensation Alphonse de Lamartine ascended to the head of the provisional government: The overwhelming majority of writers in the 1830s and 1840s either endorsed and campaigned tirelessly in behalf of the various ideological aspirations of what became known as social Romanticism or quietly consented to the practice of popular literature for the sake of swift personal recognition and financial gain.21

In the preface to his 1835 Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier refuted poetry’s potential for social utility. Five years earlier, on 25 February 1830, Gautier had famously worn a red vest in support of his fellow Romantics and their ideals at the première of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, thus casting himself as a major player in the “bataille d’Hernani” [battle of Hernani]. Hugo’s preface to Hernani broke French theater’s reliance on tenets from the classical age; Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin marked a similar 21

Robert F. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 3.

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departure from an earlier model, and his anti-utility stance has been paraphrased as l’art pour l’art ever since. Of course, the relative proximity (just five years) of these two important events, and Gautier’s involvement in each, shows the extent to which Romanticism and le Parnasse are closely aligned on some levels and yet significantly opposed on others. Indeed, “[…] opinions to this day are divided between a view of le Parnasse as a continuation of Romanticism and as a reaction against it.”22 This complexity comes precisely from le Parnasse’s rich diversity and its lack of cohesion.23 Never a clearly-defined literary movement or school as were Romanticism and, later, Symbolism (with its official manifesto), the Parnassian phenomenon was more a assemblage of poets whose work shared, to varying degrees, some common approaches to poetic content or form.24 In his landmark 1903 history of French poetry of the last third of the nineteenth century, former Parnassian Catulle Mendès reflected on the lack of cohesion in this way: Il n’y eut jamais, je le répète, ni dans l’intention, ni dans le fait, d’école parnassienne; nous n’avions rien de commun, sinon la jeunesse de l’espoir, la haine du débraillé poétique et la chimère de la beauté parfaite. Et cette beauté, chacun de nous la conçut selon son personnel idéal. Je ne pense pas qu’à aucune époque d’aucune littérature, des poètes du même moment aient été à la fois plus unis de cœur et plus différents par l’idée et par l’expression […] Au contraire, il se produisit entre ceux qu’on appelle encore parnassiens […] une extraordinaire 22

Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in NineteenthCentury French Poetry. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 17 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), 84. For more on the numerous critical points of view, see Schultz, Gendered Lyric 287n2. Critics such as Schultz and Metzidakis have revisited this question, with the former concluding that le Parnasse is “[. . .] a rejection of Romanticism's perceived femininity and an attempt to reclaim poetry as a masculine domain” (Gendered Lyric 84). See Schultz’s “Part 2: Parnassian Impassivity and Frozen Femininity,” 81-167 in Gendered Lyric. 23 In his exhaustive study of this generation of poets, Luc Badesco details the origins of this nebulous assemblage, tracing the “quatre groupes distincts” [four distinct groups] that, together, made up much of the Parnassian group. See Luc Badesco, La génération poétique de 1860. La jeunesse des deux rives, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1971), 1:320. Other useful studies on the composition of the Parnassian group are Catulle Mendès, La légende du Parnasse contemporain (Brussels: August E. Brancart, 1884) and Robert F. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets. 24 “The one hundred poets represented in the anthologies are more urgently united in the solidarity of their artistic endeavor than they are in any specifically rigid attitude or school of thought” (Denommé 17).

The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

19

divergence d’inspiration, et leur œuvre qu’on incline à présenter comme collective est, au contraire, infiniment éparse et diverse.25 [There was never, I repeat, neither in intention nor in fact, a Parnassian school; we had nothing in common, except for a youthful hope, a hatred for poetic untidiness and the chimera of perfect beauty. And this beauty, each of us conceived of it according to his personal ideal. I do not think that at any epoch in any literature, poets of the same moment had been at once more united in spirit and more different in idea and expression […] On the contrary, there was among those that are still called Parnassian […] an extraordinary divergence of inspiration, and their work that we tend to present as collective is, on the contrary, infinitely dispersed and diverse.]

The collection’s very subtitle – “Recueil de vers nouveaux” [Collection of new verses] – bespeaks a loose assemblage more than a collection of poems built around a specific poetic or philosophical approach, as Luc Badesco has argued.26 And yet, despite what Mendès calls their “extraordinaire divergence,” Parnassian poets did share certain undeniable traits; with their return to Parnassus in name came a turn to the past – le Parnasse is certainly a neoclassical movement – but once again in a slight deviation from the Romantics’ take on that same past: “Romantisme français et Parnasse se tournent également vers le passé, mais avec cela de différent, que le premier y voit des exemples à suivre dans l’avenir et pour l’avenir, et le second trouve là les temps d’harmonie qui sont définitivement passés” [French Romanticism and le Parnasse turned toward the past, but with this difference: that the former saw examples to follow in the future and for the future, and the latter found moments of harmony, gone forever].27 In the preface to his Poëmes et Poésies (1855), Leconte de Lisle defended his neoclassical stance as an anti-modernity, stating “Je hais mon temps” [I hate my time period].28 He argued against steam and electric telegraph, the most visible of the modern scenes

25

Catulle Mendès, Le mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale / E. Fasquelle, 1903), 114. 26 Luc Badesco, La Génération poétique de 1860. La jeunesse des deux rives. 2 vols (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1971), 2:1305. 27 László Bárdos, “L’esthétique du Parnasse: l’art et l’artiste dans la conception de Leconte de Lisle,” Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 20 (1978), 328. 28 Charles Leconte de Lisle, Articles, préfaces, discours, ed. Edgard Pich (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles lettres,” 1971), 127.

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that inspired so much of impressionist painting, that movement that captured so well its present day: J’ai beau tourner les yeux vers le passé, je ne l’aperçois qu’à travers la fumée de la houille, condensée en nuées épaisses dans le ciel; j’ai beau tendre l’oreille aux premiers chants de la poésie humaine, les seuls qui méritent d’être écoutés, je les entends à peine, grâce aux clameurs barbares du Pandémonium industriel. […] Les hymnes et les odes inspirées par la vapeur et la télégraphie électrique m’émeuvent médiocrement, et toutes ces périphrases didactiques, n’ayant rien de commun avec l’art, me démontreraient plutôt que les poètes deviennent d’heure en heure plus inutiles aux sociétés modernes.29 [Now matter how much I turn my eyes to the past, I can see it only through the coal smoke, condensed in thick clouds in the sky. No matter how much I open my ear to the first chants of human poetry, the only ones that deserve to be heard; I can hardly hear them, thanks to the barbaric clamor of industrial Pandemonium. […] the hymns and odes inspired by steam and the electric telegraph move me only slightly, and all these didactic periphrases, having nothing in common with art, show me instead that poets are becoming, with each passing hour, more and more useless in modern society.]

Leconte de Lisle’s hatred of the modernity that surrounded him – “Haine inoffensive, malheureusement, et qui n’attriste que moi” [Inoffensive hatred, unfortunately, that saddens only myself]30 – was expressed partly in response to the reviews of his 1852 collection Poëmes antiques, in the preface to which he had written: “Les émotions personnelles n’y ont laissé que peu de traces; les passions et les faits contemporains n’y apparaissent point” [Personal emotions left but few traces; passions and contemporary events do not appear at all]. As is equally evident in the title of 1862 collection Poésies barbares (expanded for an 1872 edition with a similar title, Poëmes barbares), Leconte de Lisle’s work led the Parnassian call for a return away from the modern civilizations towards antiquity, away from the trappings of nineteenth-century French society towards an earlier, mythological, barbaric past. Parnassian preference for a pre-modern moment is a refusal of rapidity of its changes, its ephemeral nature; as Gautier explained in “L’Art”:

29 30

Leconte de Lisle 126-27. Leconte de Lisle 127.

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Tout passe. — L’art robuste Seul à l’éternité. Le buste Survit à la cité.31 [Everything passes. — Robust art Alone is eternal. The bust Outlives the city.]

Only beauty and art can stand the test of time, as classical masterpieces show; it is from this point that the Parnassian preference for statues developed: works of art that are nearly impervious to age: Oui, l’œuvre sort plus belle D’une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.32 [Indeed, the results of art are more beautiful When they emerge from a substance Rebellious to modeling, Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.]

French verse is hardly as resilient as marble, onyx, and enamel, but Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852) made a strong case – strong enough to warrant the author’s poems appearing first in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain. The Parnassians’ repudiations of certain Romantic tenets did not translate into a similar refutation of all Romantic poets; Victor Hugo remained a dominant and largely revered presence until his death in 1885 (despite – or, rather, in part because of – his exile during the Second Empire). In fact, Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) paved the way for Parnassian poets’ formal experimentation.33 Their neoclassicism also permitted the Parnassians to draw often from mythology and 31

Gautier, Émaux et camées, ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Gallimard/Poésie, 1981), 149. For a more detailed analysis of this poem, see Peter Whyte, “‘L’art’ de Gautier: Genèse et sens,” 119-39 in Relire Théophile Gautier: Le plaisir du texte, ed. Freeman G. Henry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); thanks to Stamos Metzidakis for bringing this article to my attention. 32 Gautier, Émaux et camées 148. 33 Steve Murphy, Marges du premier Verlaine (Paris: Champion, 2003), 89.

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other legends, many of which were foreign; and the numerous archaic and foreign words and spellings throughout the poems of Le Parnasse contemporain are indicative of this predilection. In this way they were well in keeping with the popularity of the mid-century récits de voyage from Chateaubriand, Loti, Fromentin, Nerval, and even Gautier. Finally, countering the stereotypical sentimentalism of Romantic poetry, many poets of the Parnassian era emphasized a more objective poetic brand of description. Rather than the stoicism of some of the Romantics, the impassible Parnassians approached their lack of emotion from a scientific vantage point: Doubtless impressed by some of the positivist currents dominating the 1850s and 1860s, the most prominent Parnassian poets supported an alliance with scientific methodology in order that the observation of external reality might be achieved with the calm deliberation of the scholar rather than with the enervating passion of the unpredictable lyricist.34

The notion of impassibility merits our attention and should be nuanced, particularly to avoid the facile and oversimplified equating of the terms “Parnassian,” stoic,” and “impassible” that has become far too common. Although it is true that before they were called Parnassians, the poets in question here were called “Impassibles,” the label “impassible” was applied more by others – most often critics – than by the poets themselves. In addition, the very nature of the poets’ impassibility is itself more complicated than often believed. Once again, they mark an important distinction with the extreme impassibility of stoicism: Cette impassibilité, chez ses meilleurs théoriciens et écrivains, n’était assimilable ni à l’impassibilité effective de l’auteur, ni surtout à l’impassibilité du lecteur, mais à un refus d’exprimer directement des émotions fortes en tant qu’auteurs, ce qui conduisait souvent, et notamment chez Baudelaire et Flaubert, au démantèlement de l’équivalence entre auteur et narrateur ou locuteur.35 [This impassibility, in the hands of the best theoreticians and writers, was comparable neither to the author’s actual impassibility nor certainly to the reader’s impassibility, but to a refusal to express directly strong emotions as authors, which often led, especially for Baudelaire and Flaubert, to the dismantling of the equivalence between author and narrator or interlocutor.] 34 35

Denommé 2. Murphy, Marges du premier Verlaine, 86.

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The last years of le Parnasse – as well as the extent of their importance – similarly elude critics searching for quick and easy answers. A one-time participant in Le Parnasse contemporain (he contributed seven poems to the first volume and another five to the second one), Verlaine traced the end of Parnassian poetry to the Paris Commune, which at the very least delayed the publication of the second volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, dated 1869 but appearing in print after the Commune, in 1871. As he later wrote in “Du Parnasse contemporain”: Cette belle union dura jusqu’à la guerre de 70. Une catastrophe pouvait seule briser un faisceau si robuste ; engagements aux armées, gardes au rempart, divisions politiques nécessaires, – car le mot “fatal” n’est pas courageux, – un tas de choses sérieuses pour la patrie, puis pour la conscience, mit à néant, réveil brutal, le tout si bon, le rêve si beau, et parcella le cénacle en groupes, les groupes en couples, les couples en individualités, amies mais irrémédiablement antipathiques. Et ce fut bien la fin finale de ce Parnasse déjà célèbre et qui restera illustre.36 [This fine union lasted until the war of ‘70. Only a catastrophe could break this robust group; enlistments in the army, standing on ramparts, necessary political divisions – for the word “fatal” lacks courage – many serious things for the nation, and for our conscience, turned into nothingness, a brutal wake-up, everything so good, the dream so beautiful, and cut up the cenacle into groups, the groups into couples, the couples into individuals, friends but irremediably antipathetic. And such was the final end of le Parnasse, which was already famous and which would stay illustrious.]

In his remarkable biography of Rimbaud, Jean-Jacques Lefrère points to a similar time period, but more specifically to the legendary meeting between the young poète maudit and Parnassian maître Théodore de Banville in late 1871: Dans les jours qui suivirent le dîner des Vilains-Bonshommes du 30 septembre, Verlaine continua à présenter à ses relations le “jeune prodige” qu’il se flattait d’avoir découvert. Il l’aurait ainsi conduit chez Banville, qui habitait à cette époque un appartement au premier étage de la maison du 10, rue de Buci, près de l’Odéon. De ce que l’affable et souriant maître a pu dire à Alcide Bava, on ne connaît que son jugement sur le Bateau ivre: il avait fait remarquer à l’auteur qu’il

36

Paul Verlaine, Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 116-17. For a more detailed reading of Verlaine’s short study, see Murphy, Marges du premier Verlaine.

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eût été préférable de commencer son poème par “Je suis un bateau qui…” […] Conscient d’avoir donné à son Bateau ivre une vigueur qui le dispensait de tout préambule, Rimbaud ne répondit pas à la suggestion de Banville, mais, une fois dans la rue, il aurait déclaré à Verlaine dans un haussement d’épaules: “C’est un vieux con.” On peut dater de ce jour les débuts du Symbolisme et la décadence du Parnasse.37 [In the days following the dinner of the Vilains-Bonhommes on 30 September, Verlaine continued to introduce to his friends the “young prodigy” that he flattered himself with having discovered. He took him to see Banville, who lived in a first-floor apartment at 10, rue de Buci, near Odéon. Of whatever the affable and smiling master might have said to Alcide Bava [Rimbaud], we only know his opinion of “Le Bateau ivre”: he mentioned to the author that it would have been preferable to begin the poem with “I am a boat who…” […] Conscious of having given to his “Bateau ivre” a vigor that relived him from needing any preamble, Rimbaud didn’t respond to Banville’s suggestion, but, once in the street, he shrugged his shoulders and said to Verlaine: “He’s an asshole.” We can date the beginnings of Symbolism and the decadence of le Parnasse from that date.]

Not only was Parnassian poetry never a clearly defined movement or school, but it is passed over as inconsequential, even by some of the best critics of nineteenth-century French poetry. In his excellent study of the second half of the century, Laurence M. Porter intentionally skips over the period of Parnassian output, pushing it into what he calls “the chronological cracks between Romanticism and Symbolism.” For Porter, the “special labels” attributed to them “reduce them to oddities and remove them from serious consideration.”38 The present study seeks precisely to return Parnassians to serious consideration; as believable as Verlaine’s first-person accounts may be,39 it would seem that the amorphous grouping that came together in the 1860s held sway over French poetry long after 1871. In addition to the publication of a third and final volume of Le Parnasse contemporain in 1876, no major response to Parnassian poetry was made explicit throughout the 1870s, the first major challenge coming with the

37

Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Arthur Rimbaud (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 346-47. Laurence M. Porter, The Crisis of French Symbolism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4. 39 Lefrère points out that the story of Rimbaud meeting Banville comes from Verlaine, who told it to Ernest Delahaye, who in turn shared it in his letter of 11 November 1930 with Colonel Godchot (Lefrère 364n31). 38

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publication of the Symbolist manifesto in 1886.40 While this publication, like the first volume of Parnassian poetry, marked the first official manifestation of an approach to poetry that had already existed in an undefined form several years earlier, it was also characterized by a diversity that somewhat recalled that of le Parnasse: “Si l’on interrogeait séparément les poètes dits symbolistes, il est à croire qu’on obtiendrait autant de définitions qu’il y aurait d’individus interrogés” [If one asked separately each of the so-called Symbolist poets, there would probably be as many definitions as there would be individuals asked].41 Despite most critics’ insistence that Symbolism removed le Parnasse from the French poetic landscape of the late 1880s and 1890s, there is evidence, from Symbolism itself, that suggests that Parnassian poetry continued to occupy a significant place. First, as Anatole France famously showed in his response to Jean Moréas’s manifesto defining Symbolism, the new official movement’s arrival was marked by a backlash at the obscurity that it championed. Symbolism’s detractors focused on the fact that, by virtue of its professed lack of clarity, it was difficult to determine precisely what the movement stood for: “Tout ce que je devine, c’est qu’on interdit au poète symboliste de rien décrire et de rien nommer. […] Il en résulte une obscurité profonde” [All I can figure out is that the Symbolist poet is forbidden from describing and naming anything. […] What results is profound obscurity].42 This obscurity was famously formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé in his response to Jules Huret’s interviews with contemporary poets in 1891:

40

This third volume is widely thought to be the least Parnassian of the three, as it lost some of its openness, tried to enforce certain ideological stances, and even rejected Mallarmé and others; see Jean-Paul Goujon, “Le quatrième Parnasse contemporain,” Histoires littéraires 1.2 (April-June 2000), 25-34. 41 Adolphe Retté, La Plume 15 February 1892, qtd. in Bernard Delvaille, ed., La poésie symboliste (Paris: Seghers, 1971), 11-12. For Bernard Delvaille, Symbolism was easier to describe in terms of families and inherited traits, and he nevertheless concluded, “Bref, à chaque fois, toute tentative de définition semble se briser devant une inaliénable diversité” [In short, each time, every attempt at a definition seems to shatter in the face of an unalienable diversity] (Delvaille 13). 42 Anatole France, Le Temps (26 September 1886), 2.

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[…] les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entièrement et la montrent; par là ils manquent de mystère; ils retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu’ils créent. Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer, voilà le rêve.43 [As for the Parnassians, they take the thing entirely and show it; in so doing they lack mystery; they take away readers’ delicious joy of imagining that they create. Naming an object is removing three-quarters of the satisfaction of the poem, which comes from the pleasure of guessing little by little; suggesting it, that’s the dream.]

While Mallarmé’s words are often cited to show the extent of Symbolism’s aesthetic opposition to le Parnasse, elsewhere in the same interview with Huret he explains that, rather than being competitors, Symbolism and le Parnasse complement each other: Les Parnassiens, amoureux du vers très strict, beau par lui-même, n’ont pas vu qu’il n’y avait là qu’un effort complétant le leur; effort qui avait en même temps cet avantage de créer une sorte d’interrègne du grand vers harassé et qui demandait grâce.44 [The Parnassians, lovers of very strict verse, beautiful in itself, didn’t see that there was [on the part of the Symbolists] an effort complementing their own: an effort that had at the same time the advantage of creating a sort of interregnum of the great verse, which was beleaguered and crying for mercy.]

In addition, there is the question of the length of the movement’s reign; just five short years after announcing the birth of Symbolism, Jean Moréas declares it to be dead, replacing it with “L’École romane” and relegating it to nothing more than a “transitional phenomenon”: “Le Symbolisme, qui n’a eu que l’intérêt d’un phénomène de transition, est mort. Il nous faut une poésie française, vigoureuse et neuve, en un mot, ramenée à la pureté et à la dignité de son ascendance” [Symbolism, which had no more interest than that of a transitional phenomenon, is dead. We need a French poetry that is vigorous and new, in a word, brought back to the purity and the

43

Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, 1891, ed. Daniel Grojnowski (Paris: Thot, 1984), 77. 44 Huret 75.

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dignity of its ascendance].45 In addition, one of Symbolism’s great strengths – a “movement based in idealism,” it offered an intellectual and lofty goal of “pure art”46 that appealed to the most highly educated literati of the day – led to another opening for le Parnasse to remain in the public eye. Symbolism’s political connections made its manifesto a definite response to l’art pour l’art, reconsidering poetry’s potential social impact: “Supporting pure art was not a way to retreat to the ivory tower and remove oneself from socio-political concerns. It became a way to voice one’s position about how society should be: a higher level of understanding and living needed to be cultivated that could be provided by Republican ideology.”47 And yet, through its messages of obscurity and the idealized form of poetry it hoped to attain, Symbolism left unanswered the crisis of the lyric subject that had begun to take shape, in the works of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and others, during the 1870s, as the coming chapters will show. Mallarmé’s famous formulation in his essay entitled Crise de vers shifts the emphasis in his poetry from the lyric to the power of the words that make up the poem: “L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots” [The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who yields the initiative to words].48 Instead of a reflection on the crisis of the lyric subject that would then dominate his poetic project, the crisis in Mallarmé’s work lies on the surface of poetic language, complicating the physical and semantic values of words, syllables, and phonemes, so that “the poem is a form totally empty of ‘message’ in the usual sense, that is, without content – emotional, moral, or philosophical. At this point the poem is a construct that does nothing more than experiment, as it were, with the grammar of the text, or […] a construct that is nothing more than a calisthenics of words, a verbal setting-up

45

Jean Moréas, Le Figaro 14 September 1891, qtd. in Delvaille 35. “From this perspective, French Symbolism considered as a self-conscious literary movement would span only the period 1885-91” (Porter 14). 46 Richard Shryock, “Becoming Political: Symbolist Literature and the Third Republic.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2005), 388 and 390. 47 Shryock, “Becoming Political” 390. 48 Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur. Divagations. Un coup de dés (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 248.

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exercise.”49 In this way, Mallarmé and many of his Symbolist colleagues sidestep the lyric; rather than explaining how the tension between lyric subject and object could or should be resolved, Symbolism proposes removing the former from the equation altogether, thus leaving open (until such time as they can show how it is done) the question of the situation of the lyric in the poetic text. In its attempts to solidify the subject/object dynamic, the general traits of Parnassian poetry created a rigid mold in which to work; this mold had to be followed or broken. The confines of this approach to poetry were great enough that the Symbolist manifesto is a direct response to le Parnasse, but it didn’t eliminate overnight le Parnasse’s hold on poetics. In addition, Parnassian poetry remained popular, even soughtafter; in his 1884 history of Le Parnasse contemporain, Catulle Mendès points out that it was “introuvable”; certainly its being out of print points to its drawing continued interest among readers.50 Further evidence supporting le Parnasse’s continued presence after the official declaration and organization of Symbolism comes from the consecration of leaders of le Parnasse during the 1880s and 1890s: they were elected to the Académie Française (Sully-Prudhomme in 1881, François Coppée in 1884, Leconte de Lisle in 1886) and ascended to dominant positions in well established and “official” literary journals of the day. This situation is summarized by Gustave Kahn, whose interview with Jules Huret provides yet another telling account of le Parnasse’s staying power: Pour conclure, Monsieur, je crois que le symbolisme, non de par l’accord de ses représentants divers, mais de par leur lutte, remplacera le Parnasse, parce qu’il est l’Action: les meilleurs Parnassiens (ils sont rares) révisent leurs œuvres complètes et entrent très honorablement dans le passé.51 [To conclude, Sir, I believe that Symbolism, not by the agreement among its diverse representatives, but by its battle, will replace le Parnasse, because it is Action: the best Parnassians (rare in number) are revising their complete works and enter quite honorably into the past.]

49

Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978), 13. 50 La légende du Parnasse contemporain 233. 51 Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, ed. Daniel Grojnowski (Paris: Thot, 1984), 325.

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Kahn’s use of the future tense in the verb “remplacera” [will replace] is quite telling, especially in an interview given in 1891; it certainly suggests that le Parnasse is still around, although in Kahn’s opinion it is becoming somewhat staid and dated, and Symbolism will soon replace it. Unlike le Parnasse’s old-fashioned appearance, Symbolism represented a youth movement, relatively speaking, and Symbolist poets thus benefited from the social capital that an up-and-coming movement typically enjoys, particularly in contrast with an officially consecrated and sanctioned group such as the one the Parnassians had become. Despite the this opinion of le Parnasse as outdated, Huret’s series of interviews came out, as Rosemary Lloyd astutely points out, “en pleine bataille” [in the middle of the battle] between the Parnassians and Symbolists, “chaque parti étant avide de saisir l’occasion que l’enquête lui offrait de promouvoir ses propres croyances tout en dénigrant celles de l’autre” [each side avid to seize the occasion that the survey offered it to promote its own beliefs, all the while denigrating the other’s].52 An example of such partisan vitriol comes from art critic Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926), one of the first supporters of Cézanne, who told Huret the following: “Les symbolistes ne me paraissent pas dans le mouvement déterminant de notre siècle; ils représentent une réaction mort-née, ils s’occupent surtout de procédés, et ils affectent vraiment un trop extraordinaire dédain pour les conquêtes de l’esprit moderne” [The Symbolists don’t seem to me to be the determining movement of our century; they represent a stillborn reaction, they are occupied primarily with procedures, and they bear an extraordinary disdain for the conquests of the modern mind]. 53 Such a fiercely fought battle can only take place, of course, if both approaches to poetry are still not only extant, but relevant and worth fighting about, and for. As Jean-Paul Goujon has shown, the project for a fourth volume of Le Parnasse contemporain pushed forward all the way to late 1892 or early 1893, and it was well underway in 1893.54 In that same year, François Coppée published his “La ballade pour défendre la doctrine des poètes Parnassiens” [Ballad to defend the Parnassian poets’ 52

Rosemary Lloyd, “Théodore de Banville: La corde raide entre forme fixe et vers libre,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 104.3 (July-Sept. 2004), 655. 53 Huret 207. 54 Goujon 25.

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doctrine], with the poem bearing the following concluding quatrain: Le symbolisme nous dévore! France, n’en ayez pas souci, Il est des fidèles encore; Les vieux Parnassiens sont ainsi55 [Symbolism devours us! France, don’t worry, There are still faithful ones among us; The old Parnassians are that way]

As late as 1895, in the collage production Le Mur that developed out of the Cabaret des Quat’z’arts, Numa Blès published his “Poème en toc: Pour railler les poèmes en tic de Leconte de Lisle” [Poem in “toc”: To rail against the poems in “tic” by Leconte de Lisle], the subtitle an obvious play on words with Leconte de Lisle’s 1864 volume of Poèmes antiques.56 If le Parnasse was still a target of derision well into the 1890s, it clearly remained in the forefront of people’s discussions of poetry, and thus it retained its influence. These points all support this study’s claim: that the enduring presence of Parnassian poetry lasted well into the 1880s and 1890s. While mere dates of publication (1866, 1869/71, 1876) would be enough to warrant a consideration of the extent of their influence in Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s poetry, the fact that Parnassian poets continued to hold sway well after those dates suggests that their influence was greater than is typically attributed to them. As this study will continue to show, Rimbaud and Verlaine each fostered a great enough interest in Parnassian poetry to participate in it (or, in Rimbaud’s case, to wish to participate in it); each poet subsequently distanced himself from the 55

Annales politiques et littéraires (5 March 1893), 152; as Goujon notes, the poem’s original title was “Ballade pour défendre la doctrine des poètes Parnassiens contre le Symbolisme qui nous dévore” (Ballad to defend the Parnassian poets’ doctrine against the Symbolism that devours us) (26n1). 56 Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Rare Book Library, call number Le Mur I.103.a. For more on les Quat’z’arts, see my “Le Mur des Quat’z’Arts: ‘Merde pour celui qui le lira’,” Histoires littéraires 21 (January-March 2005), 139-47; and Olga Anna Dull, “From Rabelais to the Avant-Garde. Wordplays and Parody in the Wall-Journal Le Mur,” The Spirit of Montmartre. Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (New Brunswick, NJ, Zimmerli Art Museum/Rutgers University Press, 1996), 199-241.

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group, at different times and in ways that were unique to each and at the same time central to each poet’s complete poetic output. For both poets, the departure from Parnassus begins with the treatment of the lyric subject which, as we have already discussed, was characterized in the Parnassian mold for its immobility, represented most often by a statue of a woman. It should be noted that the Parnassian obsession with statues was not limited to poetry; the 1858 play Les filles de marbre presents Phidias, a Parnassian incarnation of Pygmalion, a sculptor who refuses to part with the statues he was commissioned to create: Femmes ou statues, je vous aime; mon ciseau vous a donné une seconde vie; il vous a immortalisées. Tiens!… nous sommes bien seuls, Diogène, tu vas les voir. […] Qu’elles sont belles!… vois, Diogène, elles semblent vivre, oui, elles vivent, 57 et mon génie qui les a crées n’a rien omis en elles… [Women or statues, I love you; my chisel has given you a second life; it has immortalized you. Here!… we are alone, Diogenes, you will see them. […] They are so beautiful!… You see, Diogenes, they seem to live, yes, they live, and my genius, which created them, left nothing out…]

And when Diogenes agrees, that the statues are “de belles filles de marbre” [beautiful marble women] Phidias responds: Non!… elles sont femmes et je les aime!… Oui, oui, travail de mes jours, rêves sans sommeil de mes nuits; je ne travaillerai plus, je briserai l’outil qui vous a fait naître; car vous êtes mes chefs-d’œuvre et j’ai laissé mon génie endormi à jamais dans chaque pli de vos robes blanches, dans chaque ligne de vos pales visages… Vivez!… aimez!… appartenez-moi comme je vous appartiens; on ne vous aura pas, on ne peut vous acheter, créations de l’artiste; non, non, on n’achète pas le génie, on n’achète pas l’amour.58 [No!… they are women and I love them!… Yes, yes, labor of my days, sleepless dreams of my nights; I will not work, I will break the tool that gave birth to you; for you are my masterworks and I have abandoned my genius sleeping forever in each fold of your white robes, in each line of your pale faces… Live!… Love!… Belong to me as I belong to you; no one will have you, no one may buy you, creations of the artist; no, no, one does not buy genius, one does not buy love.]

57

Théodore Barrière and Lambert Thiboust, Les filles de marbre (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1858), 4. 58 Barrière and Thiboust 4.

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To be sure, French literature had long considered different themes of women; the specific contributions of Parnassian poetry reside in the stasis of statues of women, the result of the eternal nature of beauty and a desire on behalf of the lyric subject to immobilize the object so as to appreciate its form more deeply. A brief discussion of the female statues that were so central to Parnassian poetry will in turn shed light on the poetry that played such a major role in the poetic works of Rimbaud and Verlaine. At first glance, it would seem that the Parnassian obsession with statues gives them the tools with which to attempt to come to grips with the immortality of woman’s beauty, a central element of all French lyric poetry. Continuing where Baudelaire leaves off in “La beauté” with the line, “Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre” [I am beautiful, oh mortals! Like a dream of stone]59 are Parnassian notions of idealized beauty in poems such as Banville’s “Une femme de Rubens” from his collection Les exilés: De tes formes parfaites, On verra les poëtes, Tourmentés par le mal De l’idéal, Attester par leurs charmes Le pouvoir de tes charmes Et l’immortalité De ta beauté60 [From your perfect shapes, We will see the poets, Tormented by the evil Of the Ideal,

59

Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76), 1:21. This poem, with its other oft-cited (for its Parnassianism, among other reasons) line “Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes” [I hate any movement that moves lines] is the starting point for Natalie DavidWeill’s excellent study of Gautier, Rêve de pierre: La Quête de la femme chez Théophile Gautier (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1989). 60 Théodore de Banville, Œuvres poétiques complètes de Théodore de Banville, textes électroniques interactifs, ed. Peter J. Edwards (Sackville, N.B.: Mount Allison University, 1996), lines 333-40.

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Attest by their charms To the power of your charms And the immortality Of your beauty]

The Parnassian desire to preserve female beauty leads to a heightened appreciation for feminine forms as they are depicted in statues from antiquity; chiseled out of marble, their beauty is eternal. In addition, Parnassians’ preference for the permanence of classical forms extends beyond women’s immobility to the poet’s respect of classical prosodic forms: “the representation of the modern female body invades poetic inspiration without damaging the classical poetic frame, the fixed forms of French prosody.”61 Inspired by feminist criticism, studies have brought the Parnassians’ immobilization of the female form to task, detailing its inherent misogyny and showing the extent to which this misogyny comes from the classical tradition that the Parnassians inherit and attempt to emulate, going all the way back to Petrarch. Nancy J. Vickers goes even further, showing the extent to which literary criticism has perpetuated the topoi of, on the one hand, mobility, stability, and unity (masculine), and on the other, immobility, instability, and dismemberment (feminine), referring to what she calls […] the centrality of a dialectic between the scattered and the gathered, the integrated and the disintegrated. In defining Petrarch’s “poetics of fragmentation,” these same critics have consistently identified as its primary figure the particularizing descriptive strategy adopted to evoke Laura. If the speaker’s “self” (his text, his “corpus”) is to be unified, it would seem to require the repetition of her dismembered image.62

To be sure, Petrarch was hardly the first writer to display this treatment of women in his work; not a phenomenon unique to any one writer, epoch, or literary or critical tradition, it is a universal that stems from the male-dominated classical mold, perpetuated in each

61

Eliane F. Dalmolin, “Modernity Revisited: Past and Present Female Figures in the Poetry of Banville and Baudelaire,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 25.1-2 (FallWinter 1996-97), 83. 62 Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Winter 1981), 272.

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generation.63 As Vickers argues, the consequences of this model are wide reaching: The import of Petrarch’s description of Laura extends well beyond the confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. . . . In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation and the internalization of woman’s “image” by both men and women can scarcely be overemphasized […] Silencing Diana is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and it casts generations of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the muteness of its player.64

The theme of female immobility was perpetuated elsewhere in nineteenth-century French literature: even by female authors, as George Sand’s realist novel Lélia (1833 and 1839) shows. [Sand] links the “solidarités” which ground realist aesthetics to the notion of “solidité” through the association of petrification and the female body. The central conflict of [Lélia] is acted out between the petrifying male gaze of realism and the heroine’s resistance to the fixity and corporeal imprisonment which this entails. Lélia can consequently be interpreted as constituting a self-conscious dismantling and refusal of the structures which underpin the realist text.65

Certainly, though, no one made the immobility of the female form a central theme of its aesthetics like the Parnassians did, and Gretchen Schultz convincingly demonstrates a “direct link between, on the one hand, Parnassian poetics of immobility and permanence and, on the other, a conservative ideology striving to contain femininity.”66 Just one of the numerous examples, the poem “La dame en pierre” by Charles Cros, demonstrates many of the aspects central to the Parnassian aesthetic. This poem was originally published in the 63

For another example, see Josette Féral’s study of Antigone, in which “Woman remains the instrument by which man attains unity, and she pays for it at the price of her own dispersion” (Josette Féral, “Antigone or The Irony of the Tribe,” Trans Alice Jardine and Tom Gora, Diacritics 8.3 [Fall 1978], 7). 64 Vickers 265, 278-79. 65 Nigel Harkness, “Resisting Realist Petrification in George Sand’s Lélia and Balzac’s Sarrasine,” French Studies 59.2 (April 2005), 171. Harkness has also discussed similar themes in “‘Ce marbre qui me monte jusqu’aux genoux’: Pétrification, mimésis et le mythe de Pygmalion dans Lélia (1833 et 1839),” George Sand et l’écriture expérimentale. Actes du colloque de Cérisy-la-Salle, juillet 2004, ed. Brigitte Diaz and Isabelle Naginski (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2007). 66 Schultz 84.

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second volume of le Parnasse contemporain and then reprinted in Cros’s 1873 collection Le coffret de santal.67 Formally, “La dame en pierre” displays a rigidity and a respect for order, especially with the almost exaggerated nature of the rimes riches that link every other verse (“paupières” / “prières”; “sculptures” / “tentures” etc.). The opening movement sets the stage, complete with a female object characterized by her beauty, immobility, and lack of emotion, coupled of course with suggestions of death: À Catulle Mendès. Sur ce couvercle de tombeau Elle dort. L’obscur artiste Qui l’a sculptée a vu le beau Sans rien de triste. Joignant les mains, les yeux heureux Sous le voile des paupières, Elle a des rêves amoureux Dans ses prières. Sous les plis lourds du vêtement, La chair apparaît rebelle, N’oubliant pas complètement Qu’elle était belle. Ramenés sur le sein glacé Les bras, en d’étroites manches, Rêvent l’amant qu’ont enlacé Leurs chaînes blanches. Le lévrier, comme autrefois Attendant une caresse, Dort blotti contre les pieds froids De sa maîtresse. [Upon the coffin cover She sleeps. The obscure artist Who sculpted her saw beauty Without anything sad.

67

Pages 312-14 in le Parnasse contemporain and 39-41 in Le coffret de santal.

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Joining her hands, eyes happy Beneath the veil of eyelids, She has lover’s dreams In her prayers. Under the heavy folds of her clothing, The flesh seems rebellious, Not completely forgetting That she was beautiful. Clasped upon the icy breast The arms, in tight sleeves, Dream of the lover enlaced by Their white chains. The greyhound, like long ago Waiting for a kiss, Sleeps curled up against the cold feet Of its mistress.]

From the outset of “La dame en pierre,” we see that “la dame” is relegated to a secondary role, coming as she does after the verse that situates her (“Sur ce couvercle de tombeau”). Absent from the poem’s opening verse, she is a mere function of her positioning. Once it is announced, her presence is immediately dwarfed by that of her creator, “L’obscur artiste,” who occupies more syllables in the verse (four, to her three). Furthermore, he comes from positions of power, in terms of his complexity (“obscur”) and in the activities that he generates (“a sculpté,” “a vu,”). Meanwhile, she sleeps, her inactivity bespeaking her ignorance of the world around her and, most importantly, her vulnerability: the artist is free to see as much “beau” as he would like, she is not in a position to stop him. This first stanza thus sets up the traditional dynamic for the lyric subject cum artist/sculptor in keeping with the Parnassian model, the male sculptor having full access to examine her external beauty. That beauty becomes internal in the second through fourth stanzas, with the male gaze penetrating the helpless woman to imagine the emotions within. If the opening of the poem focused on the woman on her funerary pedestal (“Sur ce couvercle de tombeau”), in these two stanzas the artist changes prepositions and dares to look underneath (“Sous le voile…,” “Sous les plis lourds…”). Of course, this description is based on a series of impossibilities – knowing if her eyes are

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happy, the nature of her dreams, the rebellion in her skin, her skin not forgetting, her arms dreaming of a past embrace – and is a construct of the artist’s fantasies posited onto her. In contrast with the themes of cold and death, the underlying animal nature metonymically appears in the fifth stanza, the skin previously seeming rebellious now represented as a faithful dog awaiting a caress. As this woman is examined and described in the present, her sleeping state recalls a past of an amorous activity; the word “autrefois” near the end of this first part leads the reader to the flashback second movement: Tout le passé revit. Je vois Les splendeurs seigneuriales. Les écussons et les pavois Des grandes salles. Les hauts plafonds de bois, bordés D’emblématiques sculptures, Les chasses, les tournois brodés Sur les tentures. Dans son fauteuil, sans nul souci Des gens dont la chambre est pleine, A quoi peut donc rêver ainsi, La châtelaine ? Ses yeux où brillent par moment Les fiertés intérieures, Lisent mélancoliquement Un livre d’heures. [All the past is relived. I see The seigniorial splendors, Badges and shields Of great halls. The high wooden ceilings, bordered With emblematic sculptures, Hunts, tournaments embroidered On the drapes In her armchair, without the slightest care For people whose rooms are full About what must she be dreaming, The chatelaine?

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Her eyes where, sporadically, Interior prides shine, Melancholically read A book of hours.]

Sculpture returns, this time as decoration that is symbolic (emblematic) so not altogether unimportant, but certainly not bearing the same signifying weight as our object-statue, “La dame en pierre.” Here, statues are but one aspect of the backdrop of excess, and the interiors of the rooms and meeting halls replace the psychological scène intérieure of the poem’s first section. The gaudiness of the decoration is made evident by the ubiquitous phoneme [s] throughout this section, emphasizing a multitude of materials, decorations, and people. The commotion of the hordes is reinforced by the volume of words in line 30 (“Des gens dont la chambre est pleine”), the only seven-syllable line that is actually composed of seven words, reaching its maximum. We must now situate the intimate scene of the poem’s first movement in its historical context, brought to us via the relived past and the chateau society evoked. Amidst these clichés, in which our “dame en pierre” risks losing her specificity, a curious presence emerges: that of the lyric “je,” who takes over for the “obscur artiste” and does the seeing here (“Je vois”). This doubling of the male presence – artist/sculptor in the first part, now poet in the second one – is not to be taken lightly, as it bears some serious consequences for the situation of the lyric subject in nineteenth-century French poetry. The transparency between the writer and the narrator – the person with pen in hand and the “je” on the page – went unquestioned, throughout much of Romanticism. Théophile Gautier challenged this notion in 1835, when he wrote his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin: Il est aussi absurde de dire qu’un homme est un ivrogne parce qu’il décrit une orgie, un débauché parce qu’il raconte une débauche que de prétendre qu’un homme est vertueux parce qu’il a fait un livre de morale; [. . .] C’est le personnage qui parle et non l’auteur.68

68

Mademoiselle de Maupin 18.

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[It is just as absurd to say that a man is a drunk because he describes an orgy, a debauched person because he tells of a debauchery, as it is to pretend that a man is virtuous because he wrote a book of morals; […] It is the character who is speaking and not the author.]

Of course, due to the very nature of lyric poetry – that is, poetry that is supposed to sing from the heart of the poet – this dissociation between author (poet) and narrator (lyric subject) was much slower to develop than in prose. This tradition of the lyric extends back to the Renaissance, during which time many of the poetic forms favored a subject’s deeply personal expression. Petrarch’s sonnets, Ronsard’s odes, and the popular “blason” poems – descriptions of particular body parts – are just some of the manifestations of the subject-object relationship that dominated French poetry of the period. Similarly, and much like in the first part of “La dame en pierre,” Romantic and Parnassian poetry most often displayed one sole male authoritative voice, respecting the neat dichotomy of subject (male) / object (female) and the other binary oppositions that grew from it. Beginning with the late 1860s and early 1870s, however, the lyric subject started to show some chinks in its armor, and the poem by Cros is a good, if minor, example of the kinds of problems the lyric would face as it reached its crisis, beginning with Rimbaud at around the same time. The final section of “La dame en pierre” seems to look ahead to such events, Quand une femme rêve ainsi Fière de sa beauté rare, C’est quelque drame sans merci69 Qui se prépare. Peut-être à temps, en pleine fleur, Celle-ci fut mise en terre. Bien qu’implacable, la douleur En fut austère.70

69

No doubt a reference to “La belle dame sans merci” [“the beautiful woman has no mercy”], a fifteenth-century poem brought back to popularity by John Keats in his 1819 poem of the same title. 70 The one major variant between the version in Le coffret de santal and the one that appeared two years earlier – on page 314 Le Parnasse contemporain – is the second stanza of this final section; in the earlier version, this stanza reads:

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L’amant n’a pas vu se ternir, Au souffle de l’infidèle, La pureté du souvenir Qu’il avait d’elle. La mort n’a pas atteint le beau. La chair perverse est tuée, Mais la forme est, sur un tombeau, Perpétuée. [When a woman dreams in this way Proud of her rare beauty, There is some drama that has no mercy That is being prepared. Perhaps in due time, in full bloom, She was put in the ground. Although implacable, her pain Was austere. The lover did not see dim, In the breath of the unfaithful, The purity of the memory That he had of her. Death has not attained beauty. The perverse flesh is killed, But the form is, on a tomb, Perpetuated.]

Unlike the first two parts of this poem, the tone in this final section looks to the future, and also speaks in more general, almost universal terms; here the woman is generalized to “une femme” The threat, or promise, of a future crisis moment is similarly non-specific, even Peut-être à temps, bien qu’en sa fleur, Celle-ci fut mise en terre. Sa mort est le moindre malheur Qu’elle ait pu faire. [Perhaps in due time, although in bloom, She was put in the ground. Her death is the smallest sadness That she was able to cause.]

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vague: “quelque drame sans merci.” With a relative absence of human presence in the second stanza followed by the impersonal tones about “L’amant” and “elle,” in the third, the poet retreats from the poem and speaks in more general terms, dissociating himself fully from the intimate scene to which he was privy at the poem’s outset. Finally, his conclusion is a neoclassical clinging to the permanence of form, understood here in terms of manifestations that are made of poetry, of stone, and of words: the last line is the sole one-word verse in the poem, representing thus a consolidation that anchors the ending. The eternity suggested by the tombstone, the marker that persists after “la chair perverse est tuée,” is a mere compensation for the poet, who seems to revert to this conventional stance of the immobilized and eternal form as a way of securing and reassuring himself after the scare from passing dangerously close to the “drame sans merci” in the poem’s tenth quatrain. The neoclassical reliving the past, the look ahead to a future “drame,” and the attempt at permanence as protection from that forthcoming crisis all are well in keeping with the Parnassian project, which relies heavily on the traditionally linear conception of historical time flowing smoothly from past to present and future. In addition, the equally powerful chronology of French poetry created an inescapable pressure, as poets sought to create their own voice with a historical context, in response to their predecessors and in distinguishing themselves from their contemporaries. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom discusses these tensions and explains that “[E]very poet is being caught up in a dialectical relationship [. . .] with another poet or poets.”71 The poet who created the greatest amount of influence in the Bloomian sense is undoubtedly Victor Hugo, who dominated French letters for most of the nineteenth century. Parnassian poets were certainly indebted to Hugo’s work, but they were equally haunted by his presence (just as, during his exile, they were confronted by the enormity of his absence). This somewhat contradictory phenomenon is perhaps best demonstrated by Théodore de Banville, who on the one hand felt enormous pressure to create his own poetic voice from under Hugo’s dominance, and on the other hand was instrumental, thanks to his 1872 Petit traité de poésie 71

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 91.

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française, in solidifying Hugo’s stature as what Steve Murphy has called “le maître incontesté de la versification française contemporaine” [the undisputed master of contemporary French versification].72 It is for this reason that Hugo’s death, in 1885, was one of the crucial factors that opened the door for innovations like free-verse poetry, which had begun in the 1870s but which made its official arrival on the scene with a series of publications, and debates, in 1886.73 Le vers libre was just one manner in which French poets responded to the crisis of the lyric subject during and immediately following the publication of the first volume of le Parnasse contemporain. Before that radical formal revolution, however, poets considering the situation of the lyric took into account the dominant neoclassical Parnassian model, and considered it either as a source of inspiration as in “La dame en pierre,” or as a target for new formulations of the previously traditional conception of the subject/object dynamic. It was this second approach that was undertaken by poets such as Verlaine and Rimbaud, as we will see in the next chapters of this study. Those seeking a new voice in nineteenth-century French letters acutely felt Bloom’s anxiety of influence and they attempted to subvert one or several aspects of the relationship between lyric subject and object. In addition to troubling this complex relationship by disrupting traditional notions (historical, chronological) of time and/or space, they did so, often simultaneously albeit to varying degrees, on another level: formally, with respect to departures from traditionally held tenets of French versification. The next two sections of this study will focus on how two poets look to the past in order to find a niche for their own work. Verlaine was eventually included in two of the volumes, but the liberties he took with respect to versification and traditional gender roles marginalized him among the Parnassian poets. Later, after the Parnassians fell out of favor, Verlaine’s career flour72

Murphy, Marges du premier Verlaine 89. For more on the anxiety of influence that Banville felt towards Hugo, see the thesis by Jean-Marc Hovasse, Victor Hugo et le Parnasse, dir. Guy Rosa, Université Paris VII, 1999), cited in Murphy, Stratégies de Rimbaud (Paris: Champion, 2005), 100n16. 73 For the history of French free-verse poetry, see Murat, “Rimbaud et le vers libre,” reprinted in L’art de Rimbaud (437-58); Bobillot; Delvaille; Scott; Krysinska, in particular the introduction (1-20); and Shryock, ed., especially 156-59 (see bibliography for complete information).

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ished, in part as a result of his exclusion. When Rimbaud’s proposal to Le Parnasse contemporain was rejected, he turned away from the most established of his contemporaries and created a new voice. In so doing, his poetry took on a subversive nature, the likes of which French poetry had never before seen, and hasn’t seen since.

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Chapter Two Verlaine’s Identities

Paul Verlaine’s Parnassian phase is usually interpreted in one of several ways. Some have seen his contributions to the 1866 volume of Le Parnasse contemporain as clear indications of his sincere desire to subscribe to the Parnassian tenets of l’art pour l’art. As Paul Martino asks: [Q]ui avait été plus parnassien que lui? On l’avait vu s’agiter, comme un joyeux initié, dans les cénacles de la première heure; il s’était fait connaître dans le premier Parnasse contemporain; à vingt-deux ans, il avait publié un petit volume en vers, les Poèmes saturniens (1866), écrits sur des thèmes parnassiens, avec des procédés parnassiens.1 [Who had been more Parnassian than he? He was seen restless like a joyous new initiate, in the first cenacles; he had made himself known in the first Parnasse contemporain at twenty-two, he had published a little volume in verse, Poèmes saturniens (1866), written on Parnassian themes, with Parnassian style.]

Others, though, have pointed to Verlaine the innovator, who was as quick to leave le Parnasse as he was to join it; for Stéphane Mallarmé, who published eleven poems in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, Verlaine’s Parnassian experience was notable in that he was the first to distance himself from Parnassian poetry: “C’est lui le premier qui a réagi contre l’impeccabilité et l’impassibilité parnassiennes” [He was the first to react against the Parnassian impeccability and impassibility].2 More recently, scholars give Verlaine credit for adopting Parnassian poetry to the point of parody.

1 2

Martino 111. Huret 78.

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On peut douter si, bien plutôt que d’une influence subie, il ne s’agit pas ici d’une parodie délibérée et secrètement ironique, s’inscrivant finalement contre l’esthétique à laquelle de tels poèmes semblent souscrire.3 [It is possible to doubt if, rather than a lived influence, it is more a question here of a deliberate and secretly ironic parody, ending up working against the aesthetic to which such poems seem to subscribe.]

Many see a parody in the line from “Epilogue,” the last poem in Poèmes saturniens: “Est-elle marbre, ou non, la Vénus de Milo?” [Is she marble or not, the Venus de Milo?] (ŒP 96). Rather than read this as ironic, I prefer to take it at face value, particularly given its context, as it sets up a moderately convincing Parnassian call in the last two stanzas: Nous donc, sculptons avec le ciseau des Pensées Le bloc vierge du Beau, Paros immaculé, Et faisons-en surgir sous nos mains empressées Quelque pure statue au péplos étoilé, Afin qu’un jour, frappant de rayons gris et roses Le chef-d’œuvre serein, comme un nouveau Memnon, L’Aube-Postérité, fille des Temps moroses, Fasse dans l’air futur retentir notre nom! [We then, let us sculpt with the chisel of Thoughts The virgin block of Beauty, immaculate Paros, And let us make it surge under our eager hands Some pure statue with starry peplum, So that one day, beating with gray and pink rays The serene masterwork, like a new Memnon, Dusk-Posterity, daughter of morose Times, May retain our name in the future air!]

All but one of Verlaine’s poems from the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain were reprinted, in different sections, in Poèmes saturniens, which also appeared in 1866. Throughout this collection, and in particular in its first section, “Melancholia,” there lies a poet searching for his own voice underneath the Parnassian exterior, unsure 3

Paul Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec and Jacques Borel, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 49; subsequently abbreviated ŒP followed by the page number.

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of his recently adopted poetic identity.4 Indeed, Verlaine would later claim a lack of maturity, stating that he was just a schoolboy when he wrote some of the poems: “… les trois quarts des pièces qui les composent furent écrites en rhétorique et en seconde, plusieurs même en troisième (pardon!)” [three-fourths of the pieces that make it up were written in Rhetoric class in second-to-last year of high school, some even in third-to-last year (sorry!)] (ŒP 1071). In addition, titles such as “Melancholia,” “Résignation,” “Nevermore,” and “L’Angoisse” suggest the unease of a lyric subject searching for its voice. Through a reading of several poems from “Melancholia,” this study seeks to explore Verlaine’s Parnassian phase. For the young poet, then, the ultimate goal was, obviously, to have his poems read and heard. As Bornecque points out, such was the desire of the young Verlaine (only twenty-two years old in 1866): “Aucune préférence doctrinale ne l’a guidé alors, mais uniquement l’appât d’un cénacle où se faire entendre” [No doctrinal preference guided him then, just the lure of a cenacle where he could get himself heard].5 As a result, Verlaine turned to the newest “cénacle” on the horizon, which was not a proper “cenacle” at all, but rather the loosely formed group of poets publishing with Alphonse Lemerre. Bornecque continues by stating that, if Verlaine had started writing four years earlier, he would have published in the Revue fantaisiste of 1860-61, like Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès and Albert Glatigny: [S]i sa date de naissance ou le rythme de son évolution créatrice l’avaient fait accéder quatre ans plus tôt à la vie littéraire, c’est à la ‘Revue Fantaisiste’ de 1860-61 qu’il eût écrit, comme Baudelaire, Mendès, Glatigny; c’est sur l’esthétique fantaisiste qu’il eût directement et franchement greffé son génie dramatique.6 [If his birth date or the rhythm of his creative evolution had made him accede to literary life four years earlier, he would have written in the Revue fantaisiste of

4

For an excellent discussion of Chateaubriand and melancholy, which she defines as a literary response to “a significant shift in the relationship between the living and the dead in France,” see Naomi Schor, One Hundred Years of Melancholy. The Zaharoff Lecture for 1996 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996). 5 Jacques-Henry Bornecque, Les Poèmes saturniens de Paul Verlaine (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1977), 44. 6 Bornecque 44.

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1860-61, like Baudelaire, Mendès, and Glatigny; and he would have directly and frankly grafted his dramatic genius onto the fantaisiste aesthetic.]

Once he found the proper group of contemporaries, he next had to decide just what to write. Poets of the 1860s did not have the political motivations of their predecessors; Gautier’s formula “tout ce qui est utile est laid” specifically rejects the political engagement of the generation of poets of 1830. As Verlaine himself says in his Mémoires d’un veuf: …les jeunes poètes du premier Parnasse […] n’avaient pas, comme ‘ceux de 1830’, d’éclatantes polémiques à soutenir […] leur visée étant plus haute, leur idéal infiniment moins concret; il ne s’agissait point pour eux d’affirmer de bruyantes théories par tous les moyens, fût-ce par le pugilat, si cher aux jeunes forces. Non, ils étaient et sont pour la plupart restés poètes dans le sens le plus aristocratique du mot: rappeler l’élite de la foule au respect de l’élite des esprits, et l’élite des esprits au culte de l’exquis de l’esprit, prendre en quelque sorte sous les bras cet enfant de bonne volonté, le bourgeois intelligent et sensible, pour lui faire baiser (fût-ce de force, mais c’est ainsi que se pratique les bonnes éducations) le pied chaste de la Muse – mot païen, idée éternelle – tel fut leur but, atteint. Et remarquez bien qu’ils n’avaient pas de chef. Leur conjonction fut spontanée, personne qui les eût poussés au combat, qu’eux-mêmes – et ce fut assez! Certes, ils admiraient tels ou tels, les vieux et les jeunes, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Banville, ces derniers, lutteurs superbes d’isolement et d’originalité, partant sans disciples possibles – mais observez comme chacun d’eux ne ressemble – à part certaines formules communes inévitables – à personne de ses glorieux aînés, non plus qu’aux premiers de ce siècle.7 [the young poets of the first Parnasse […] didn’t have, like “those of 1830,” explosive polemics to support […], their view being loftier, their ideal infinitely less concrete; for them it was not about affirming explosive theories by any means possible, even by fighting, so dear to young forces. No, they were and they have for the most part remained poets in the most aristocratic meaning of the word: recalling the elite of the crowd to the respect of the elite of minds, and the elite of minds to the cult of the exquisite of the mind, taking under their arm to a certain extent this well intentioned child, the intelligent and sensitive bourgeois, to make him kiss (even by force, but such is the case for good educations) the chaste foot of the Muse – pagan word, eternal idea – such was their goal, attained. And note that they didn’t have a leader. Their assemblage was spontaneous, no one pushed them to combat, other than themselves – and it was enough! Certainly, they admired these and those, the old and the young, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Banville, these last ones, superb fighters of isolation and originality, leaving 7

Paul Verlaine, Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 112-13.

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without possible disciples – but observe how each one of them resembles – with the exception of certain inevitable common formulas – no one among their glorious ancestors, no more than among the first [poets] of this century.]

Despite the Parnassians’ lack of a clear program that unified the aesthetic and the political, Verlaine’s desire to be heard, read, and accepted led him to imitate – sometimes to the point of parody – his predecessors and contemporaries: Rimbaud, à dix-sept ans, massacre allégrement tous les poètes qui l’ont précédé. Verlaine, c’est tout le contraire. Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Banville, bien d’autres sont présents auprès de lui et apparaissent à la faveur de réminiscences ou d’imitations voulues.8 [Rimbaud, at seventeen, cheerfully massacred all the poets who preceded him. For Verlaine it was the opposite. Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Banville, many more are present before him and appear in the form of reminiscences or desired imitations.]

Imitation is also the subject of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s review of Poèmes saturniens upon their publication: “Un Baudelaire puritain, combinaison funèbrement drôlatique, sans le talent net de M. Baudelaire, avec des reflets de M. Hugo et d’Alfred de Musset, ici et là, tel est M. Paul Verlaine…” [A puritan Baudelaire, combination funereally droll, without the clear talent of M. Baudelaire, with reflections of M. Hugo and of Alfred de Musset, here and there, such is M. Paul Verlaine].9 Finally, it is worth noting that Verlaine would later devote an entire series of poems in Jadis et Naguère to other people’s styles, À la manière de plusieurs (ŒP 370-76). By 1865, Verlaine had already adopted Gautier’s sentiments as his own, as the following passage from the former’s article on Baudelaire suggests: “Oui, le but de la Poésie, c’est le Beau, le Beau seul, le Beau pur, sans alliage d’Utile, de Vrai ou de Juste” [Yes, the goal of Poetry is Beauty, Beauty alone, pure Beauty, without connection to the Useful, the True or the Just].10

8

Jacques Robichez, ed., Œuvres poétiques, by Paul Verlaine (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1994), 6. 9 Qtd. in Edmond Lepelletier, Paul Verlaine: Sa vie, son œuvre (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1982), 150. 10 Verlaine, Œuvres en prose complètes, 605.

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And so it is with the poems of Poèmes saturniens, a collection that in its very title suggests external influences, in particular from Baudelaire, whose “Épigraphe pour un livre condamné” begins: Lecteur paisible et bucolique, Sobre et naïf homme de bien, Jette ce livre saturnien, Orgiaque et mélancolique.11 [Peaceful and bucolic reader, Sober and naïve good man, Throw away this Saturnian book, Orgiastic and melancholic.]

The desire to be a poet, to be published, leads – during the 1860s – to the first step in this aesthetic of a quest for subjectivity. The emphasis in this study is on the search of Verlaine’s poetic subject, not on any biographical reading of the poems. While I agree with Jacques-Henry Bornecque’s characterization of Verlaine’s project as a battle – a “lutte” – I disagree with the way in which he mixes the poet’s life and work: Sous l’émulation littéraire, par delà le simple “engagement,” tout révèle une lutte sourde et toujours reprise, avant le recueil comme en lui encore: lutte entre le personnage et la personne, comme entre l’auteur Verlaine et l’homme Verlaine. Lutte entre l’aspiration de l’être à un équilibre supérieur de l’indocilité obsessive des thèmes qui lui sont imposés de toute éternité. Les Poèmes Saturniens sont une symbiose, ou plutôt un premier essai de symbiose.12 [Under the guise of literary emulation, by way of the simple “commitment,” everything reveals a battle, deaf and always taken up again, forced with the collection as though it were still inside him: battle between the character and the person, as though between Verlaine the author and Verlaine the man. Battle between the being’s aspirations to a superior equilibrium of obsessive indocility of themes that are imposed on him for all eternity. The Poèmes saturniens are a symbiosis, or rather a first attempt at symbiosis.]

It should be noted that Bornecque is in excellent company on this score. While he is right to point out Verlaine’s poetic debt to 11

Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76), 1:137. This poem opened the 1868 posthumous edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. 12 Bornecque 13.

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Baudelaire (who, let us not forget, saw sixteen of his own poems included in the 1866 volume of Le Parnasse contemporain), Fowlie does so while adding an unnecessary comment about Verlaine’s psychological state: Born under the planet Saturn, he illustrated the characteristics of the Saturnian: coldness in mood and gloomy in disposition. His first book acknowledges this heritage, Les Poèmes Saturniens (1866), influenced by Baudelaire’s apostrophe concerning Les Fleurs du Mal: jette ce livre saturnien [throw away this Saturnian book].13

I agree with the first half of Arnaud Bernadet’s statement that “Verlaine cherche à se constituer une voix propre, son système de discours, dans le cadre d’une poétique négative” [Verlaine seeks to create his own voice, his system of discourse, within the framework of a negative poetics];14 however, I prefer to see Verlaine making constructive attempts to achieve his goal, rather than consider a “une poétique négative.” As Bernadet notes, Verlaine’s notion of subjectivity invents itself through a series of mediations: “[L]a subjectivité verlainienne, son langage-vision, s’inventent et s’infinitisent à travers des médiations” [Verlainian subjectivity and his language-vision invent themselves and go on to infinities through mediations].15 Several poems from this collection show, at this first stage in Verlaine’s career, an aesthetic of a subject who is not entirely comfortable with his own Parnassian subjectivity. Later, in a preface to the Poèmes saturniens that is often called a “Critique des Poèmes saturniens,”16 written at the moment of the reprinting of the volume in 1890,17 Verlaine would describe his poetic evolution as a series of daily changes: “On change, n’est-ce pas? Quotidiennement, dit-on. […] On mûrit et vieillit avec et selon le temps, voilà tout” [We change, don’t we? Every day, they say. We mature and age with and according to 13

Fowlie 102. Arnaud Bernadet, “Esthétique de l’artifice: Paul Verlaine (1868-1874)”, in Verlaine à la loupe: Colloque de Cérisy 11-18 juillet 1996, ed. Jean-Michel Gouvard and Steve Murphy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 308. 15 “Esthétique de l’artifice” 307. 16 See Steve Murphy’s exhaustive “Éléments pour l’étude des Poèmes saturniens,” Revue Verlaine 3-4 (1996), 165-274. 17 Verlaine’s essay first appeared in La Revue d’aujourd’hui 3 (15 March 1890). 14

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time, that’s all] (ŒP 1071). From the very beginning of Poèmes saturniens, in the “Prologue,” Verlaine’s poet is presented as one who follows, not as one who leads by example: [……………………] et si naguères On le vit au milieu des hommes, épousant Leurs querelles, pleurant avec eux, les poussant Aux guerres, célébrant l’orgueil des Républiques Et l’éclat militaire et les splendeurs auliques […] (ŒP 60) [[……………………] and if long ago He was seen amongst men, espousing Their quarrels, crying with them, pushing them on To wars, celebrating the pride of Republics And military successes and courtly splendors]

Rather, the poet takes a side in others’ debates (“épousant / Leurs querelles”) and helps rally them to go to war. Here he doesn’t lead the men, and perhaps he himself doesn’t even participate in the wars. Finally, he celebrates victories that are not his own: those of the Republic, of military successes and of courtly splendors.

Melancholia Before proceeding to the other poems, though, a word about “Melancholia,” the title of the first section of Poèmes saturniens. Among the inventory of Verlaine’s belongings in 1871 is Albrecht Dürer’s “La Melancholia.”18 That this etching would inspire poetry is neither surprising nor even unique to Verlaine; in fact, Henri Cazalis’s poem “Devant la Mélencolia d’Albert Dürer” appeared in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, two pages after Verlaine’s “L’Angoisse,” which will be discussed later. Both the Dürer etching and the Cazalis poem present melancholia at the moment of poetic creation, and Cazalis is particularly troubled by the thought that no moral creation can be eternal: “Oh! puisque tout se doit anéantir, / Que sert donc de créer sans fin et de bâtir?…” [Oh! Since everything is doomed to obliteration / What is the point of creating without end and build-

18

Lepelletier 303.

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ing?].19 For Verlaine, however, the question posed by creation is not why, but what. As Dürer’s image shows, the subject is surrounded with numerous sources of inspiration: the sciences are represented by geometric shapes, tools, numbers, and measures of weights and time, and nature is certainly present in the sunset, the rainbow, the water, and the animal at the subject’s feet. And yet, the subject – perturbed, frustrated – looks, waiting for something to inspire him. His eyes are fixed not on any inspirational object, but on the sign/theme of melancholy; amid all these objects, the poet is transfixed by his frustration with lack of inspiration. If from this etching Cazalis focuses on the ephemeral nature of all objects, Verlaine takes a decidedly different approach, caring less about the lasting effects of creation and more about the subject himself and his search for a poetic identity: La source de cette mélancolie qui […] fait trembler le vers, le suspend, le brise soudain sans que jamais on en arrive à la confidence, au sanglot, à l’effusion lyrique, elle n’est pas, on le voit, dans les événements ou dans les choses: elle est dans le poète même, cherchant son expression dès les vers de jeunesse […] (ŒP 53) [The source of this melancholia which […] makes the verse trembles, suspends it, suddenly shatters it without us ever arriving at confidence, at sobbing, at lyric effusion, this source is not, we see it, in events or in things: it is in the poet himself, looking for his expression from his very first poems of youth.]

In light of this valorization of melancholia, it comes as no surprise that Poe concluded that “Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.”20 Indeed, Verlaine’s poet is ill at ease with his adopted persona poetica right from the beginning of “Melancholia.” In “Résignation,” the youthful desires of the second stanza are pushed to the side in the poem’s third stanza when the poet, understanding the realities of life, holds back and learns to bend, to fit in:

19

Le Parnasse contemporain: Recueil de vers nouveaux, 3 vols (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1866-76; Westmead, Farnborough, Hants.: Gregg International Publishers Ltd, 1970), 1:283. 20 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Oxford Book of American Essays, ed. Brander Matthews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1914), 14.

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[...] Aujourd’hui, plus calme et non moins ardent, Mais sachant la vie et qu’il faut qu’on plie, J’ai dû refréner ma belle folie, Sans me résigner par trop cependant. Soit! le grandiose échappe à ma dent, Mais, fi de l’aimable et fi de la lie! Et je hais toujours la femme jolie, La rime assonante et l’ami prudent. (ŒP 60) [Today, calmer and no less ardent, But knowing life and that one must bend, I had to refrain my beautiful craziness, Without resigning myself too much however. So be it! Grandiosity escapes my teeth, But, I turn my nose up at niceness and at dregs! And I still hate pretty women, The assonant rhyme and the prudent friend.]

Bent but not broken, Verlaine’s poet goes to great lengths to assure us that he has not given up completely; he is still “non moins ardent,” he promises that he didn’t resign himself too much, and he still holds onto his disdains and hatreds listed in the last three verses. All these reassurances, I suggest, go overboard and come from a lyric subject who is trying a bit too hard to convince the reader – and perhaps trying to convince himself – of their veracity. To the contrary, “Résignation” is the first poem in this section precisely because it announces all of the bending, refraining, and resigning to fit in that are to come. Indeed, reigning in all that his youthful desire created in the second stanza presents not a stable and secure subject, but rather one who is dealing with a great internal struggle. As a result of the mature restraint fighting against the youthful impulses – impulses that are still referred to, almost longingly, as “ma belle folie” – the subject is shown as divided and destabilized. For the lyric subject, who sees the traditional source of poetic inspiration – his desires – constrained by his mature voice, poetry becomes an awkward undertaking at best, and while this poem is a decasyllabic sonnet, it is no accident that Verlaine presents this destabilized scene in the upside-down world of

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an inverted sonnet, what he referred to elsewhere as a “sonnet jambes en l’air” [sonnet with its legs in the air].21 The next poem, “Nevermore” (ŒP 61), borrows its title and main theme from Poe’s “The Raven,” about which Baudelaire said, “Le sujet en est mince, c’est une pure œuvre d’art” [its subject is thin; it’s a pure work of art].22 Poe’s account of writing “The Raven” shows why this fits so well in a section entitled “Melancholia”: Now, never losing sight of the object supremeness, or perfection, at all points, I asked myself – “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death – was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious – “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”23

Poe’s poem is appealing precisely because the subject matter is not just the death of Beauty, but the death of Beauty as seen through the eyes of her lover, through the interaction between subject and object. In his take on Poe’s “most melancholy moment,” Verlaine brings us not just to the death of a beautiful woman as described by her bereaved lover, but to the moment in the past at which that woman asked her lover about his happiest day. In its Verlainian incarnation, this chiasmus – in which the apogee of love and the abyss of death occur simultaneously – moves the attention away from the death itself and focuses instead on its impact on the poetic subject, who is grappling with his memories, with what it means to be a subject in mourning. This clever marrying of love and death is one way in which Verlaine tries on his poetic identity. Following the dearth of poetry-worthy topics in Dürer’s “Melancholia” and his take on desire as inspiration in “Résignation,” Verlaine turns to personal memories as a potential source of inspiration at this poem’s onset: Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? L’automne Faisait voler la grive à travers l’aire atone,

21

From Verlaine’s poem “À Louis et Jean Jullien” (ŒP 568-69); thanks to Steve Murphy for bringing this poem to my attention. 22 Baudelaire 2:274. 23 Poe 20.

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Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détone. [Memory, memory, what do you want of me? Autumn Made the thrush fly through atonal air, And the sun shot a monotonous ray On the yellowing wood where the north wind detonates.]

Such is the theme later in Poèmes saturniens in “Chanson d’automne,” in which the external stimuli of the sounds of violins and the striking of the hour activate a flood of memories that carries the poet away. Invoking a lost loved one is certainly a tried and true fount of poetry and as such represents nothing new for Verlaine or his contemporaries. Whereas the poetic subject is confronted with, and thus defined by, all that he could not write about in “Résignation,” in “Nevermore” he searches for a way to approach things that he should write about, things that have been deemed poetic for centuries. In addition, Verlaine’s lyric subject confronts “la femme jolie” that he so hated in “Résignation,” and we see the interaction between the lyric subject and object that are so important in much of Parnassian poetry. Rather than establish a clear relationship between two distinct beings, as most of his contemporaries would do, Verlaine blurs the lines between his destabilized subject and its object, beginning with the “Nous” of the second stanza: Nous étions seul à seule et marchions en rêvant, Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensée au vent. Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard émouvant: “Quel fut ton plus beau jour?” fit sa voix d’or vivant [We were alone together, walking while dreaming, She and I, hair and thought in the wind. Suddenly, turning her touching look toward me: “What was your most beautiful day?” asked her voice of living gold]

The slippage between poet and beloved, between subject and object, is evident throughout this stanza, a juxtaposition of solitude and shared experience. They are at once together (“Nous étions,” “et marchions en rêvant”) and individuals, alone, this somewhat contradictory state brought to life in the words “seul à seule.” In addition, the one major liberty that Verlaine takes with respect to French versification in this poem – not alternating the rhymes in the first two stanzas – also

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suggests this tension where there would normally be the harmonious alternation between the masculine and feminine. The separate individuals at the beginning of the second line (“Elle et moi”) stand in contrast with the “Nous” of the previous line, and the phrase “les cheveux et la pensée au vent” remains curiously ambiguous. Although implied by the order of the parallel construction, the hair and thoughts are not explicitly attributed to either the subject or the object, further blurring the division between them. In the end, this vagary, which is left unresolved, matters little to the outcome of the poem, but the fact that the poetic subject is constantly redefining his own boundaries speaks volumes about Verlaine’s aesthetic in these Parnassian-era poems. Verlaine’s lyric subject is much less well defined than in other Parnassian poems, and as a result the interplay between subject and object takes on an even greater importance. Since the subject is destabilized, coming apart at the seams, one way in which it seeks to redefine itself is in relation to its object. Just as in “Nevermore,” the subject/object interaction sometimes leads to blurring of the line that so clearly marks the distinction between the Parnassian subject and object. Other times, as we shall see, the tension between the unsettled lyric subjectivity and its object takes on different forms. An example of a Verlainian poetic subject who defines himself in terms of his object is evident in the sonnet “Vœu” (ŒP 61). The “premières maîtresses” of the poem’s beginning are just the first presences to which Verlainian subjectivity is linked in this poem: Ah! Les oaristys! Les premières maîtresses! L’or des cheveux, l’azur des yeux, la fleur des chairs, Et puis, parmi l’odeur des corps jeunes et chers, La spontanéité craintive des caresses! Sont-elles assez loin toutes ces allégresses Et toutes ces candeurs! Hélas! toutes devers Le printemps des regrets ont fui les noirs hivers De mes ennuis, de mes dégoûts, de mes détresses! [Ah! The idylls! The first mistresses! Gold of hair, azure of eyes, flower of skins, And then, among the odor of young and dear bodies, The fearful spontaneity of caresses!

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Are they far enough, all these elations And all these candors! Alas! All toward The springtime of regrets fled the black winters Of my boredoms, of my disgusts, of my distresses!]

Their distance from the present moment of the poem is presented as the theme of regret that fills the second strophe, in two seasons: “Le printemps des regrets” and “les noirs hivers.” It is the spring that is most interesting here; normally associated with birth and, implicitly, hope for the future, this springtime is already tainted, looking backward in time towards previous loss or lack. If the usually hopeful spring is this bleak, then the subsequent moments are that much worse, as is felt by the accumulative effect in the winters being “De mes ennuis, de mes dégoûts, de mes détresses!” What is even worse for the poet is the feeling that the solitude is of his own doing, that he has driven his companions away with “les noirs hivers / De mes ennuis, de mes dégoûts, de mes détresses!” Insofar as the subject defines himself in terms of his object(s), this poetic subject is lost, alone, and depressed. A similar theme is evident in “Nocturne parisienne” (ŒP 83-86), also from Poèmes saturniens: Il n’en est pas moins intéressant de constater que le jeune homme déplore non pas l’absence d’une sylphide, d’une Eve pareille à lui-même comme celle que René cherche dans les vents, mais d’une sœur plus âgée qui lui indique la voie à suivre, qui l’empêche de tomber dans un “précipice affreux.”24 [It is no less interesting to note that the young man deplores not the absence of a sylph-like creature, of an Eve similar to himself like the one that René searches for in the winds, but that of an older sister who might show him the path to take, who might protect him from falling into a “horrible precipice.”]

Such a dependency on an object for self-definition is difficult to capture in words, as the end of “Vœu” demonstrates. Si que me voilà seul à présent, morne et seul, Morne et désespéré, plus glacé qu’un aïeul, Et tel qu’un orphelin pauvre sans sœur aînée. Ô la femme à l’amour câlin et réchauffant, Douce, pensive et brune, et jamais étonnée, Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant! 24

Eléonore Zimmermann, Magies de Verlaine (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), 282n10.

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[Would that I might find myself alone at present, dull and alone, Dull and desperate, more frozen than an ancestor, And such that a poor heartless orphan without older sister. Oh woman of tender and warming love, Sweet, thoughtful and brown, and never surprised, And who sometimes kisses you on the forehead, like a child!]

The subject’s recognition of his own solitude leaves him at a loss for words, evident in the repetition – almost like a stuttering – of “seul” and “morne” in the first two lines of the third stanza. This litany of descriptions here is not accumulative, but instead seems corrective, as if the subject cannot find the proper words to describe his present condition. Inability to define one’s self comes, at least in part, from the limits inherent in language to provide tools sufficient for such description, and the “Vœu” of this poem is as much a wish for a clear subjectivity as it is for the words to describe it; indeed, the personal presences and their capacity for linguistic communication are inextricably linked here. The personal roles mentioned in the third tercet – “aïeul,” “orphelin sans sœur aînée” – are, somehow, complementary characteristics, linked by the “Et tel qu’” of this stanza’s last line. In choosing a frozen “aïeul,” Verlaine brings the past into the present, much like with the regrets of the second stanza. The orphan figure brings to this combination more than the solitude it typifies, since it is bears the specific lack “sans sœur aînée,” without a view forward to what the young child would grow to become. On the one hand a frozen ancestor, unable to communicate with descendants; on the other, a young orphan who cannot look up to an older sister; these two roles co-exist to create a solitude that is fixed in its own present, as young and old alike are equally denied a future. Furthermore, each role is (a) relative, only existing in relation to an other; the Verlaine’s freezing of the ancestor gives it the lack similar to that of an orphan, always defined in terms of the family that it does not have. Language’s inability to capture these tensions are implied, finally, in the one role that receives love and tenderness, the poem’s last word. It is worth recalling that the word “infant” comes, etymologically, from the Latin infans, without speech. Silence proves to be golden, as it is the only means by which one can receive “l’amour câlin et

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réchauffant” of the last tercet. It is only through this “enfant” that the loss at the beginning of the poem is filled – or would be filled, if the subject’s wish is fulfilled – with the restoration of a recognizable subjectivity. Indeed, through his longing for the return of the woman (with the “Ô” of the last tercet), we see that it is in their interaction that he can redefine his self. Of course, if role of the child enjoys the benefit of not being constrained by language, it also suffers the disadvantage – shared by the other roles in this poem, as we have seen – of still being dependent upon an other for its own existence, as a child can only be born through the existence of parents. The struggle with language and poetry is also present in “Nevermore,” to which we shall now return. In this poem, there is yet another level of interpretation: if the “elle” is the Muse, then this poem, like “Résignation,” is also about the poet struggling at the moment of poetic creation. Nature offers the poet precious little to work with in the first stanza, the platitudes echoed by the flatness of the repeated rhyme ending each line: [………………………………] L’automne Faisait voler la grive à travers l’air atone, Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détone.25 [……………………………… Autumn Made the thrush fly through atonal air, And the sun shot a monotonous ray On the yellowing wood where the north wind detonates.]

The memories of the poetic subject and Muse being together in the second and third stanza – sometimes one and the same, sometimes distinct beings – echo the description of the poet’s “belle folie” in the second stanza in “Résignation.” Finally, the poet longingly remembers the first offerings of the Muse, on the levels of subject matter (“Ah! les premières fleurs, qu’elles sont parfumées!”) and suitable poetic language (“Et qu’il bruit avec un murmure charmant / Le premier oui qui sort de lèvres bien-aimées!” [original emphasis]; note the importance of first word to leave her lips). In his Parnassian subject’s self25

For an excellent discussion of this rhyme and the significance of the verbs “détonner” and “détoner” in “détone,” see Murphy, Marges du premier Verlaine, 14345.

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definition with respect to his object and in his version of the moment of poetic creation, we see Verlaine’s aesthetic of the destabilized lyric subject trying to right himself, trying to re-stabilize his poetic self. Lest his tension between the lyric subject and its self-definition be considered an aspect solely of Verlaine’s post-Parnassian verse, it is important to note that the poems discussed here from Poèmes saturniens, manifest such tensions well before Verlaine’s departure from Parnassian poetry. In fact, of the eleven poems of Verlaine’s to appear in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, the only two that are included in the section “Melancholia” from Poèmes saturniens are “Mon Rêve familier” and “L’Angoisse,” which this study will now consider. The former (ŒP 63-64) is yet another poem in which Verlaine’s poetic subject defines himself wholly in relation to his object, describing his heart at the beginning of the second stanza as “transparent / Pour elle seule”: Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant D’une femme inconnue, et que j’aime, et qui m’aime Et qui n’est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même Ni tout à fait une autre, et m’aime et me comprend. Car elle me comprend, et mon cœur, transparent Pour elle seule, hélas! cesse d’être un problème Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême, Elle seule les sait rafraîchir, en pleurant. [I often have this strange and penetrating dream Of a woman I don’t know, and whom I love, and who loves me And who is, each time, neither quite the same Nor quite another, and who loves and understands me. For she understands me, and my heart, transparent For her alone, alas! ceases to be a problem For her alone, and the sweat on my pale forehead, She alone knows how to soothe, while crying.]

The feminine object is the idealized object of affection of the subject’s recurring dream, normally a relatively simple object for a lyric subject to define. However, instead of presenting a clear ideal – which, by extension, would both imply and reinforce a clear sense of self – the object is notable for its lack of clear lines and characteristics. “Dès l’ouverture, [ce texte] débouche sur un univers de certitudes dé-faites,

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disparates, apparemment immaîtrisables, sur un ensemble de trouvailles disparues” [From the beginning, [this text] opens on a universe of certitudes that are un-done, disparate, apparently uncontrollable, on an ensemble of discoveries that have disappeared].26 Although Verlaine again presents interaction between subject and object as having a defining role for each participant, his destabilized poetic subject cannot be defined so unequivocally. Reflecting his own inability to embody a unique and consistent self, the subject describes the woman in the dream as being “Ni tout à fait la même / Ni tout à fait une autre.” Even in his idealized dream state the poet doesn’t choose a fixed image of this unknown woman, and Verlaine’s description of the woman displays the lack of importance attributed to precise details as the poem continues: Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse? — Je l’ignore. Son nom? Je me souviens qu’il est doux et sonore Comme ceux des aimés que la Vie exila. Son regard est pareil au regard des statues, Et, pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a L’inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues. [Is her hair brown, blond, or red? I don’t now. Her name? I remember that it is sweet and sonorous Like those of loved ones that Life exiled. Her glance is identical to the glance of statues, And, as for her voice, faraway, and calm, and grave, she has The inflexion of dear voices that have fallen silent.]

It is precisely from this lack of decision that the poet’s description of the woman gains its strength; both the woman’s Parnassian statuesque look and her voice have as their distinguishing characteristic the lack of any prominent characteristic. Instead of the vague description of the woman finally reaching a resolution by coming into focus at the end of the poem, the poetic subject celebrates the woman in her unclear, unfixed state, even solidifying her presence by comparing her glance “au regard des statues.” In a nod to the Parnassian preference for permanence and immobility, Verlaine anchors the woman’s gaze, the 26

Richard L. Barnett, “La Sémantique du désir,” USF Language Quarterly 26.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1988): 3.

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sole attribute that the subject seems capable of capturing. At the same time, he valorizes the indecisive nature of his own description and the lack of clear decision in his poem. In this regard, the general lack of clarity in “Mon Rêve familier” is consistent with the obscurity for which Symbolist poetry has come to be known, as we have already seen in our earlier discussion of Mallarmé’s statement that “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer, voilà le rêve.” However, contrary to Symbolism, which seeks to remove traces of subjectivity from a poem – best summed up by Mallarmé’s “disparition élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots” –, subjectivity takes center stage in “Mon Rêve familier.” Since Verlaine’s subject defines himself in terms of his object, it follows logically that a definition of this idealized dream woman that is based on indecision and lack results in a definition of the poetic subject as one of equal indecision and lack. Whereas in “Nevermore” the problem of defining a clear poetic subject was evident in external boundaries and in the slippage between subject and object, the crisis in “Mon Rêve familier” is a more internal one, focusing instead on the inability to present a clearly defined object and by extension reflecting a similarly poorlydefined poetic subject. Finally, let us turn our attention to “L’Angoisse” (ŒP 65), the last poem from the section “Melancholia.” As was previously mentioned, “Mon Rêve familier” and “L’Angoisse” are the only two poems from “Melancholia” that appeared first in Le Parnasse contemporain. Curiously enough, all of Verlaine’s contributions to the volume were grouped together, under his name, with one exception; this poem, entitled “Angoisse” before having the definite article added to its Poèmes saturniens title, was one of many under the heading “Sonnets,” a group of sonnets by numerous poets. The subject in “L’Angoisse” opens the poem by taking the familiar Parnassian stance of refusing one of the traditional trappings of Romanticism, the reliance on Nature for inspiration: Nature, rien de toi ne m’émeut, ni les champs Nourriciers, ni l’écho vermeil des pastorales Siciliennes, ni les pompes aurorales, Ni la solennité dolente des couchants.

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[Nature, nothing of you moves me, neither the nourishing Fields, nor the rosy echo of Sicilian Pastorals, nor the pomp of daybreak, Nor the doleful solemnity of sunsets.]

In addition, the two enjambments, the rich rhyme of “pastorales” and “aurorales” and the repetition of the word “ni” throughout this first strophe all place this “angoisse” in good Parnassian company. In the poem’s second and third stanzas, the lyric subject goes down the list of all that he rejects: Je ris de l’Art, je ris de l’Homme aussi, des chants, Des vers, des temples grecs et des tours en spirales Qu’étirent dans le ciel vide les cathédrales, Et je vois du même œil les bons et les méchants. Je ne crois pas en Dieu, j’abjure et je renie Toute pensée, et quant à la vieille ironie, L’Amour, je voudrais bien qu’on ne m’en parlât plus. [I laugh at Art, I laugh at Man also, at the songs, The verses, the Greek temples and the spiral towers That cathedrals stretch into the empty heavens, And I see the good and the bad with the same eye. I don’t believe in God, I abjure and renounce All thought, and as for that old irony, Love, I’d like for no one to talk to me about it anymore.]

One consequence of this rather comprehensive list – from Nature to Art, from Man and language to God, thought, and of course Love – is that the subject is, in effect, defining his poetic self by process of elimination. The question, then, is what is left? The poem’s last stanza provides an answer: Lasse de vivre, ayant peur de mourir, pareille Au brick perdu jouet du flux et du reflux, Mon âme pour d’affreux naufrages appareille. [Weary of living, afraid of dying, like A lost ship, plaything of ebb and flow, My soul sets sail for terrible shipwrecks.]

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This tercet offers up the familiar poet-as-boat metaphor, the travels of the “brick perdu” promising to follow a path similar to the one evoked at the end of the “Prologue” to “Melancholia” (“Maintenant, va, mon Livre, où le hasard te mène!” [Now go, my Book, wherever chance may lead you!] [ŒP 60]) or the end of “Chanson d’automne” (“Deçà, delà, / Pareil à la / Feuille morte” [Over here, over there, / Like a / Dead leaf] [ŒP 73]). As most critics are quick to point out, the last lines of “L’Angoisse” are indicative of Verlaine’s debt to Baudelaire, particularly to the latter’s “La Musique”: Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions D’un vaisseau qui souffre; Le bon vent, la tempête et ses convulsions Sur l’immense gouffre Me bercent. D’autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir De mon désespoir!27 [I feel vibrating in me all the passions Of a suffering vessel; The good wind, the tempest and its convulsions On the immense gulf Rock me. At other times, flat calm, great mirror Of my despair!]

Laurence Porter has suggested that this poem ends with “the loss of a personal identity, which can be expressed and maintained only through words.”28 While I agree that the status of a personal identity is key to understanding “L’Angoisse,” there is a much different reading of the poem that I would like to propose here. Specifically, I wish to suggest that the word “appareiller” – the last word in the poem, and the last word in the section “Melancholia” – has a second meaning that until now has been ignored. Although the context – particularly in recalling Baudelaire – seems to suggest the most common definition of the word, the nautical meaning of preparing to set sail, such was not

27

Baudelaire 1:68. Other possible sources for this last stanza include Baudelaire’s “Les Sept Vieillards,” Antoni Deschamps’s “Après la mort de Laure,” and Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s “Une Descente dans le Mælstrom” (Bornecque 211-12). 28 Porter 87.

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the first usage of the verb in the nineteenth century. Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel defines the verb as follows: Joindre un objet à un autre qui lui soit pareil: APPAREILLER des tableaux, des vases. APPAREILLER un service de porcelaine. Vous aurez de la peine à APPAREILLER ces pistolets. Je cherche à APPAREILLER cette étoffe.29 [To pair an object with another one to which it is similar; to MATCH paintings, vases. To MATCH a porcelain set. You will have a hard time trying to MATCH these pistols. I am trying to MATCH this fabric.]

In Verlaine’s poem, then, the soul is not simply going out to sea, but is rather going out to weather the terrible shipwrecks in order to find the “autre qui lui soit pareil,” the other that defines him. As we have already seen, this theme of Verlaine’s poetic subject looking for the object that makes him part of a complete set, without which he is dépareillé (orphaned). Underneath its Baudelairian themes, then, “L’Angoisse” gives us the hint of something else: the search for the complement that makes the Verlainian lyric subject whole. An identification of self that relies so heavily on the other in order to make itself whole is, I wish to suggest, completely in keeping with Verlaine’s other poems, both from “Melancholia,” from elsewhere in Poèmes saturniens, and from his overall poetic work. Furthermore, the extremely rich rhyme of “pareille” and “appareille,” particularly after the rather bland rhyme of “plus” / “reflux,” also suggests the mirroring of the self and its other in this poem. What, then, to make of the fact that Verlaine’s poem, and this section, close with the poetic subject out searching for his other, which is in fact – since Verlaine’s subject defines itself in terms of its relation to its object – a search for his poetic self? Given the context in which Verlaine wrote his Poèmes saturniens – regardless of whether or not they were included in contemporaneous volume of Le Parnasse contemporain – the Verlainian search for poetic subjectivity is played out in the anguish and melancholy of poems like “L’Angoisse” and indeed entire sections like “Melancholia.” At this point it might be useful to recall that the very word “angoisse,” which, according to Larousse, comes from the Latin word angustia, meaning a tightening, from angustus, narrow, and from the verb angus, meaning “I 29

Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, s.v. “Appareiller.”

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tighten.”30 The claustrophobia that Verlaine’s poetic subject displays in squeezing its self into the narrow confines of Parnassian poetry was real, and it is felt throughout Poèmes saturniens. As successful as Verlaine was at being Parnassian – already more successful than Rimbaud, if being included in Le Parnasse contemporain is the measure we wish to use – his lyric subject was not able to maintain the stable strong presence found in other Parnassian poems. The destabilized subject would quickly shed the trappings of Parnassian poetry in order to make room for the next phase in which he would be defined by his mediations with his other, as the joyous heterosexual lover in La Bonne Chanson. While we have so far considered poems from Poèmes saturniens that were included in “Melancholia,” the rest of Verlaine’s first collection was contemporaneous with the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain. In “Initium” (ŒP 78) the poetic subject’s memories of a blond dancer mark the moment of the arrival of Passion. True to Parnassian form, the feminine object is not capable of any movement of her own; her hair plays “sur les volutes / De son oreille” [On the volutes / Of her ear]. The only physical movement attributed to her comes in the second strophe, when she is being carried (away) by the music, and her soul shines through her eyes: Cependant elle allait, et la mazurque lente La portait dans son rythme indolent comme un vers, — Rime mélodieuse, image étincelante, — Et son âme d’enfant rayonnait à travers La sensuelle ampleur de ses yeux gris et verts. [Nevertheless she went, and the slow mazurka Carried her in its indolent rhythm like a verse, — Melodious rhyme, sparkling image, — And her childlike soul shone through The sensual fullness of her grey and green eyes.]

In a rather un-Parnassian stance, however, Verlaine’s poetic subject makes a point – set off by hyphens, no less – to show his own immobility, thus taking on a characteristic more often attributed to the feminine object: “Et depuis, ma Pensée – immobile – contemple” [And since, my Thought – immobile – contemplates]. This identifica30

Larousse, s.v. “Angoisse.”

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tion of the subject with his object, then, is somewhat reminiscent of “Mon Rêve familier,” in which the object’s characteristics – or lack thereof – reflect the same qualities in the subject. Unlike “Mon Rêve familier,” however, in which the poetic subject is defined automatically in terms of his object, “Initium” shows the subject’s definition of (poetic) self constructed in reaction to the way he sees – in this case, remembers – the feminine object. Finally, the culmination of the poet’s self–definition through reaction is the moment of Passion: “Et je crois que voici venir la Passion” [And I believe that Passion is coming]. Set off from the rest of the poem by a blank space, this last line speaks volumes to the status of the lyric subject in Poèmes saturniens. Verlaine’s lyric subject announces Passion’s arrival unequivocally, with a confidence in self and language, not seen in poems previously discussed. Even with this uncharacteristic confidence, however, the subject is still defined in relation to an object; passion would hardly be worth mentioning without the object for which one is passionate. In Poèmes saturniens, Verlaine’s first collection of poetry, it is fitting that the lyric subject is the initiate – the Initium – who learns about Passion, and about poetry, and about his troubled poetic self, throughout the collection. As several poems from “Melancholia” have shown, Verlaine’s poetry involves the poetic subject’s search for identity through interaction with its object. Rather than being unique to Poèmes saturniens, I believe that this project extends throughout Verlaine’s entire poetic work, and is but one phase within the larger context of a constantly evolving search for poetic subjectivity. In each collection, the search is redefined, and the lyric subject adopts a new role to play, each time framed within the context of a couple.31 After the Parnassian phase of the 1860s, he turns to the love-struck subject addressing his bien-aimée in Fêtes galantes and in La Bonne Chanson. No longer 31

Those who focus on strictly biographical readings will be forever limited to the most reductive of comments, like this one: “Et cette appréhension grandissante éclaire certes les constantes tentatives de Verlaine pour se ‘ranger,’ pour échapper à luimême – dans le mariage, dans la vie bourgeoise, dans la pratique d’une foi, dans l’‘essai de culture’ de Juniville –, comme elle éclaire aussi ses échecs successifs” [And this growing apprehension certainly enlightens Verlaine’s constant attempts to “behave” himself, to escape himself – in marriage, in bourgeois life, in the practice of his faith, in the “attempt at culture” of Juniville – just like it also enlightens his successive failures] (ŒP 53).

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under the influence of Saturn, Verlaine’s poems in Romances sans paroles are greatly influenced by another great poète maudit, and his poetic subject is on the brink of collapse. The devout and reborn poet of Sagesse is in constant conversation with God, and finally the debauched subject of Verlaine’s erotic collections explores the different partnerships and role-playing in “Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance, de folie […]” [All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness].32

The Love-Struck Subject Verlaine ended his 1890 “Critique des Poèmes saturniens” by “not regretting too much” the existence of his vers de jeunesse: Voici toujours, avec deux ou trois corrections de pure nécessité, les Poèmes saturniens de 1867 que je ne regrette pas trop d’avoir écrits alors. À très prochainement la Bonne chanson (1870) et c’en sera fini de la réimpression de mes juvenilia. (ŒP 1074) [Here they are still, with two or three corrections of pure necessity, the Poèmes saturniens of 1867 that I still don’t regret too much having written. Very soon the Bonne chanson (1870) and then that will be the end of the reprinting of my juvenilia.]

As we will see, while Verlaine’s life might have been different in 1870 than it was in 1866, the poetry of La Bonne Chanson is still based in large part on the aesthetic stance he began in the Poèmes saturniens; that is, an aesthetics composed of an unstable subject who defines his self, for better or for worse, in terms of his object.33

32

Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. Antoine Adam, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 251. Subsequent references to Rimbaud come from this edition unless indicated otherwise. 33 Several other critics have seen similar links between the Poèmes saturniens and La Bonne Chanson. About “L’Angoisse,” Borel (unfortunately basing his comments largely on Verlaine’s biography) states: “On ne peut douter, à cette époque, d’un véritable affolement panique de Verlaine devant lui-même” [One cannot doubt, during this time, a veritable panic of Verlaine confronting himself] and he goes on to make the connection between that search for identity and La Bonne Chanson: “Cet effroi ne sera pas étranger à la tentative de fixation – ou d’exorcisme – dont témoigne

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The major shift in Verlaine’s life between the poems under Parnassus and Saturn of 1866 and 1870 is at first more biographical than poetic. In 1869, the twenty-five-year-old poet meets Mathilde Mauté, “cette jeune fille de seize ans, bourgeoise et ingénue, conventionnellement coquette et sage, avec des prétentions à l’aristocratie et au bel esprit” [this young girl of sixteen, bourgeois and ingénue, conventionally coquettish and wise, with pretensions toward the aristocracy and a great mind] (ŒP 135) who would become his wife a year later. While I prefer to leave Verlaine’s biographical details and their impact on his work to his biographers,34 it is important to note the inherent conflict with, on the one hand, his homosexual desires and, on the other, a conventional monogamous and heterosexual existence with Mathilde. To be sure, Mathilde had an enormous impact on his personal life; soon after their courtship began, in a letter to his friend Léon Valade in 1869, Verlaine called himself: Un Paul Verlaine nouveau, idyllique, florianesque, bien portant sous tous les rapports, absolument étranger au bonhomme de mes dernières lettres, voilà ce que je puis vous annoncer ore rotondo. Par quel miracle? — Cherchez la femme! (j’entends la femme de mes rêves, l’épouse de mon poème en prose:… à peine réelle. Qui? me direz-vous? — Curieux! — Sachez seulement qu’Elle est charmante, mignonne, spirituelle, qu’elle aime les vers et correspond enfin de point en point à mon idéal.35 [A new Paul Verlaine, idyllic, florianesque, in good health in all regards, absolutely foreign to the gentleman of my last letters, here is what I can announce ore rotondo. By what miracle? Cherchez la femme! (I mean the woman of my dreams, the spouse of my prose poem:… hardly real. Why, you ask me? Curious! Know just that She is charming, cute, spiritual, that she loves verse and corresponds in all ways to my ideal.]

Nevertheless, his poetry was still centered on the interaction between the poetic subject and object. Most critics find fault with La Bonne Chanson for its platitudes of the lyric subject addressing his lover and

La Bonne Chanson” [This dread will no longer be foreign to the attempt at fixation – or of exorcism – to which La Bonne Chanson bears witness] (166). 34 For a biography of Verlaine, see Alain Buisine, Paul Verlaine: Histoire d’un corps (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 1995); Pierre Petitfils, Paul Verlaine (Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1994); and Henri Troyat, Verlaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). 35 Verlaine, Correspondance générale, ed. Michael Pakenham (Paris: Fayard, 2005) 1:168.

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interpret the poems as a celebration of the poet’s courtship with Mathilde, to whom the collection was dedicated. For Zayed, “La tentation du prosaïsme, de la fausse éloquence, de la rhétorique, de la déclamation oratoire l’emporte sur le raffinement de la préciosité” [The temptation for the prosaic, for false eloquence, for rhetoric, for oratory declamation wins out over the refinement of preciosity]. 36 Chaussivert sums up years of Verlaine criticism by saying: Ce que la critique reproche à Verlaine, c’est de ne pas être verlainien, c’est de ne pas écrire une poésie conforme à sa sensibilité et à ses aspirations de poète; elle l’accuse d’insincérité, de facticité du sentiment, elle décèle une banalité du vers et des rythmes; bref, elle refuse à La Bonne Chanson toute valeur poétique.37 [Criticism reproaches Verlaine for not being Verlainian, for not writing a poetry conforming to his sensibilities and to his aspirations as a poet; it accuses him of insincerity, of artificiality of sentiment, it detects a banality of verse and of rhythms; in short, it refuses La Bonne Chanson all poetic value.]

Certainly, those who choose to read Verlaine’s poetry as the simple poetic transcription of his personal life see the divided lyric subject as a mirror of the divided Verlaine, split between heterosexuality and homosexuality. However, such tempting readings do no justice to Verlaine’s ability to construct fictitious poetic subjects. On this point Charles D. Minahen notes: Like many of the well-known “confessional” authors, including Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau, Verlaine constructs texts in the first person that draw heavily on his personal experience. But the constructed autobiographical self […] is always a simulacrum, a figured figure.38

What is more interesting to the present study, however, is how the collection’s cliché themes of the male poetic subject celebrating his feminine object are questioned and problematized. Just as the masculine subjectivity in Poèmes saturniens was portrayed as destabilized

36

Georges Zayed, La Formation littéraire de Verlaine. (Geneva: Droz, 1962 ; rev. ed. Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1970), 381. 37 J.-S. Chaussivert, L’Art verlainien dans La Bonne Chanson (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1973), 7. 38 “Homosexual Erotic Scripting in Verlaine’s Hombres” in Articulations of Difference. Gender Studies and Writing in French, ed. Dominique D. Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 120.

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and ill at ease with its self, poems from La Bonne Chanson similarly display the subject lacking the confidence of self-identification. From this short collection – only twenty-one poems – a couple of illustrations will suffice. The cliché “doux mal qu’on souffre en aimant” [sweet evil that one suffers when in love] invoked in the second poem is equally present in the third one. Here Verlaine’s destabilized poetic subject is far removed from his previous incarnation in the Poèmes saturniens. Instead of the familiar scene of the subject admiring and, through his gaze, controlling the feminine object, Verlaine reverses the power dynamic. From the poem’s beginning, we see a subject who completely lacks control: En robe grise et verte avec des ruches, Un jour de juin que j’étais soucieux, Elle apparut souriante à mes yeux Qui l’admiraient sans redouter d’embûches; Elle alla, vint, revint, s’assit, parla. Légère et grave, ironique, attendrie: Et je sentais en mon âme assombrie Comme un joyeux reflet de tout cela; (ŒP 143) [In a grey and green dress with beehives, A June day that I was concerned, She appeared smiling to my eyes Which admired her without thinking of a trap; She went, came, came back again, sat down, spoke. Light and serious, ironic, softened: And I felt in my darkened soul Like a joyous reflection of all that;]

In the poem’s first stanza, the subject is identified by his anxiety (“soucieux”), naïvely not suspecting any problems (“sans redouter d’embûches”). The second strophe puts the woman into movement and gives her actions, unlike the Parnassian idealized female statue, and the subject can only react. Furthermore, the quality of his reaction reduces the subject further, as he is but a mere reflection of all the qualities that he sees; this is somewhat reminiscent of the subject/object identification through reflection in “Mon Rêve familier.” Her voice, described in the third stanza, finishes the subject

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off in the last one, subjecting him to her full powers (“Au plein pouvoir”) and leaving him at her complete mercy. Sa voix, étant de la musique fine, Accompagnait délicieusement L’esprit sans fiel de son babil charmant Où la gaîté d’un cœur bon se devine. Aussi soudain fus-je, après le semblant D’une révolte aussitôt étouffée, Au plein pouvoir de la petite Fée Que depuis lors je supplie en tremblant. (ŒP 143) [Her voice, being fine music, Deliciously accompanied The gall-less spirit of her charming prattle Where the gaiety of a good heart can be felt. So suddenly was I, after the semblance Of a revolt quickly stifled, Under the total power of the little Fairy That since then I beg while trembling.]

In addition to the obvious interaction between the subject and his object, however, it is clear that this feminine object is not just any object. For just like in the poems “Nevermore” and “Résignation” from Poèmes saturniens, this poem also operates as an account of poetic creation. And if the feminine object in “En robe grise et verte…” is the poet’s Muse, then the poet is reduced to being completely under his Muse’s control: “Au plein pouvoir de la petite Fée.” Another poem in La Bonne Chanson in which the interaction between the subject and object is shown in terms of a significantly powerless subject is the fourth poem (ŒP 144). Added to the anaphora of the first three stanzas is an internal repetition of the same word or phrase: with “Puisque…,” the repetition at the beginning of the first line’s second hemistich opens the poem; the second stanza’s “C’en est fait…” stands out as the contre-rejet between the second and third lines; “Arrière…” in the third strophe is anaphorically repeated in the first and third lines, and the line-internal repetition again is a contrerejet, this time between the third and fourth lines in the stanza. The changing rhythm of the first three stanzas is met with an equally

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interesting repetition in the last four, in which the poetic subject attempts to state what he wants: [...] Car je veux, maintenant qu’un Être de lumière A dans ma nuit profonde émis cette clarté D’une amour à la fois immortelle et première, De par la grâce, le sourire et la bonté, Je veux, guidé par vous, beaux yeux aux flammes douces, Par toi conduit, ô main où tremblera ma main, Marcher droit, que ce soit par des sentiers de mousses Ou que rocs et cailloux encombrent le chemin; Oui, je veux marcher droit et calme dans la Vie, Vers le but où le sort dirigera mes pas, Sans violence, sans remords et sans envie: Ce sera le devoir heureux aux gais combats. Et comme, pour bercer les lenteurs de la route, Je chanterai des airs ingénus, je me dis Qu’elle m’écoutera sans déplaisir sans doute; Et vraiment je ne veux pas d’autre Paradis. [Because I want, now that a Being of light Has in my profound night emitted this clarity Of a love at once immortal and first, Through grace, smile, and goodness, I want, guided by you, beautiful eyes with sweet flames, By you led, oh hand where my hand trembles, To walk straight, be it by paths of moss Or should rocks and stones should encumber the path; Yes, I want to walk straight and calmly in Life, Toward the goal where fate will direct my steps, Without violence, without remorse and without wanting: It will be the happy duty of gay combats. And since, to sway the slowness of the route, I will sing simple airs, I tell myself That she will listen to me without displeasure no doubt; And truly I do not want another Paradise.]

Although the subject starts off the first stanza above with a clear statement of desire (“Car je veux”), he immediately turns to a digres-

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sion that runs the length of the stanza. As in the previous poem, where he was subjected to the “plein pouvoir de la petite Fée,” the distraction suggests that he is again not completely in control of his surroundings or their effects on him. Here, his world is invaded, his “nuit profonde” by the “clarté” from an “un Être de lumière.” In the second one, he fares somewhat better, the digression being a mere clause qualifying how he is to be guided. While he is more successful in his ability to express himself, thereby asserting his self through language – unlike in the preceding strophe, there is a verb here: “Marcher” – he is still living under the control of an other (“guidé par vous” and “Par toi conduit”). Trying both to right himself and to remind himself of what he was trying to say with the word “Oui,” the lyric subject makes a third and successful attempt at completing a thought without interruption: “Oui, je veux marcher droit et calme dans la Vie.” But at this late stage, after two previous attempts with varying degrees of success, is this statement wholly believable? Certainly not; the difficulty he had in getting the words out underscore the lack of conviction behind those words and, as a result, the sincerity of his desired action – that of “marcher droit et calme” – itself becomes suspect. Within the larger context that we have established, the poetic subject, then, is unsuccessful in convincing the reader of his desire to walk the straight and narrow; furthermore, we see in this poem another round in his continuing struggle for self-identification. In addition to being guided by his lover’s beautiful eyes and led by her hand, we see that his free act of walking is not so independent after all. The goal of his walk is to arrive at the place where “le sort dirigera mes pas,” again recalling the subject being led, rather than leading, throughout Poèmes saturniens.39

Verlaine’s Poetics of Indecision Starting with Romances sans paroles, “[…] on ne peut plus désormais parler de l’œuvre de Verlaine sans parler d’abord de sa rencontre avec Rimbaud” [one can no longer speak of Verlaine’s work without 39

As was mentioned above, see in particular the end of the “Prologue” to “Melancholia” or the end of “Chanson d’automne.”

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first speaking of his meeting with Rimbaud] (ŒP 171). Before embarking on a discussion of this collection, then, a brief detour is in order. In September 1871, seventeen-year-old Rimbaud wrote to Verlaine, “J’ai fait le projet de faire un grand poème, et je ne peux travailler à Charleville” [I have undertaken the project of a great poem, and I cannot work in Charleville] to which Verlaine responded, “Venez, chère grande âme, on vous appelle, on vous attend” [Come, great dear soul, we call you, we await you].40 According to Zayed, “Lorsque Rimbaud vint à lui avec sa théorie du voyant, ses vers extraordinairement évocateurs, sa volonté puissante et autoritaire, et … le charme brutal de sa personne, Verlaine fut immédiatement captivé; ce fut alors la grande aventure” [When Rimbaud came to him with his theory of the voyant, his extraordinarily evocative verses, his powerful and authoritative desire, and … the brutal charm of his personality, Verlaine was immediately captivated; it was the great adventure].41 Such began a tormented poetic and homosexual partnership that ended with Verlaine – whom Mathilde divorced – in prison for having shot Rimbaud in the wrist in a hotel room in Brussels on 10 July 1873. Rimbaud’s impact on this collection – written while the two poets were together in London and Brussels 42 – is certain. As Verlaine wrote to his friend and editor Edmond Lepelletier: Je tiens beaucoup à la dédicace à Rimbaud. D’abord comme protestation, puis parce que ces vers ont été faits lui étant là et m’ayant poussé beaucoup à les faire, surtout comme témoignage de reconnaissance pour le dévouement et l’affection qu’il m’a témoignés toujours et particulièrement quand j’ai failli mourir.43 [I feel strongly about the dedication to Rimbaud. First as a protestation, then because these verses were written with him being there and pushing me to write them, and above all as testimony to my gratitude for the devotion and affection he bore me always and particularly when I nearly died.]

40

Rimbaud 260, 261. Zayed 350. 42 For the sake of historical context, the first poem from the section “Ariettes oubliées” was published in La Renaissance on 18 May 1872, the fifth one on 29 June of the same year. 43 Letter to Edmond Lepelletier, Jehonville, 19 May 1873. Correspondance 1:321; original emphasis. 41

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Verlaine saw these poems as a response to the celebration of marriage and heterosexuality in La Bonne Chanson; as such, one can hardly be surprised to learn of his alternate title for some of the poems: “Mon petit volume est intitulé: Romances sans paroles; une dizaine de petits poëmes pourraient en effet se dénommer: Mauvaise Chanson” [My little volume is entitled: Romances sans paroles; ten little poems that actually could have been called: Mauvaise chanson].44 Later that year, he described his poems as “quelque chose comme la Bonne chanson retournée” [something like the Bonne chanson turned around].45 Numerous studies have investigated the extent of Rimbaud’s impact on Romances sans paroles. Zayed considers Rimbaud’s major contribution to be “la condamnation de la rime et le mouvement du vers, et peut-être aussi, un peu, la méprise dans le choix des mots” [the condemnation of rhyme and the movement of verse, and perhaps also, a little bit, disdain in the choice of words].46 Without entering into the discussion of which poems refer to whom among Verlaine’s sexual partners 47 – interesting but not useful in these pages – this study agrees with the editors of Verlaine’s Œuvres poétiques complètes that, in general, Rimbaud’s influence was a liberating one: “Cette liberté que Rimbaud adjure Verlaine de ne pas renoncer, c’est, aussi bien, la faculté de persévérer dans ce que son art propre a d’inouï et de singulier, de ne pas retomber dans l’ornière des jeux anciens” [This liberty that Rimbaud begs Verlaine not to renounce, it is just as much the faculty to persevere in what is innovative and unique about his very art, to not fall back into the rut of the old game] (ŒP 177). Thanks in part to Rimbaud, Verlaine’s new-found freedom is most evident in the masterful new rhythms he created for French verse. But if the liberties he takes with respect to versification are inspired by Rimbaud’s poetic project, the latter’s influence ends there even though, as Murphy points out, “on est allé parfois jusqu’à attribuer à Rimbaud tout le mérite des Romances sans paroles” [some 44

Letter to Emile Blémont, London, 5 October 1872. Correspondance 1:256; original emphasis. 45 Correspondance 1:287. 46 Zayed 354. See Zayed’s chapter “Rimbaud,” pages 346-67, and also Henri Peyre, Rimbaud vu par Verlaine (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1975), especially “Poèmes de Verlaine relatifs à Rimbaud et commentaires,” pages 129-98. 47 For a biographical interpretation of the section “Ariettes oubliées,” for example, see ŒP 179.

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have gone so far as to attribute to Rimbaud all the merit of Romances sans paroles].48 Certainly, he was tempted to follow Rimbaud’s project from the “Lettres du voyant” for “la poésie objective,” for it offered both a goal that would be difficult to obtain and suggestions on how to get there. Describing the poems in the “Paysages belges” section of Romances sans paroles, Verlaine wrote: Je caresse l’idée de faire, – dès que ma tête sera bien reconquise, – un livre de poëmes (dans le sens suivi du mot, poëmes didactiques si tu veux), d’où l’homme sera complètement banni. Des paysages, des choses, malice des choses […] bonté, etc., etc., des choses […] Les vers seront d’après un système auquel je vais arriver.49 [I am playing with the idea of writing – as soon as my head is back – a book of poems (in the strict sense of the word, didactic if you prefer), from which man will be completely banned. Landscapes, things, malice of things […] goodness, etc., etc., of things […] The verses will be ordered in a system which I shall soon derive.]

Zayed explains much of this is attributable to Rimbaud: […] illuminer l’action, la libérer, la susciter, apprendre à son “Compagnon d’Enfer” une dynamique du rêve – à laquelle d’ailleurs Verlaine n’arrivera jamais à s’adapter parce qu’elle est contraire à son tempérament [.…] Sous l’influence aussi de Rimbaud, Verlaine essaya d’introduire dans sa poésie la vision de “l’inconnu” et l’expression de “l’insaisissable,” mais il n’aboutit qu’à la traduction d’états oniriques beaucoup plus proches de ceux de Poe et de Gérard de Nerval […] que de l’hallucination rimbaldienne qui distord et déforme les images réelles.50 [illuminate action, liberate it, arouse it, teach his “Companion of Hell” a dynamics of dream – to which Verlaine will never truly come to adapt for himself because it is contrary to his temperament […] Under the influence also of Rimbaud, Verlaine tried to introduce into his poetry the vision of the “unknown” and the expression of the “unattainable,” but he only arrived at the translation of imaginary states much closer to those of Poe and Gérard de Nerval […] than to the Rimbaldian hallucination which distorts and deforms real images.]

48

Marges du premier Verlaine 11. Letter to Edmond Lepelletier, Jehonville, 16 May 1873, Correspondance 1:313-14; original emphasis. Also see ŒP 177-78. 50 Zayed 381, 356. 49

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While the section “Paysages belges” perhaps marks a failed attempt at a “system,” there is a smaller failure that extends throughout Romances sans paroles, even before and after it. Some feel that Rimbaud’s contribution was to get Verlaine to recognize his true self; the editors of the Pléiade edition summarize their position, a stance that relies in no small part on the biographical, as follows: Rimbaud assiste à la naissance de presque toutes les Romances sans paroles; son rôle, dans cette naissance, est celui d’un ferment; c’est lui qui, en grande partie du moins, a contraint Verlaine à se reconnaître et à se choisir. (ŒP 177) [Rimbaud is present at the birth of almost all of the Romances sans paroles; his role, in this birth, is that of a fermenting agent; it is he who, to a great extent at least, compelled Verlaine to recognize and choose himself.]

Biography notwithstanding, numerous poems from this collection show Verlaine’s poetic subject to be just as problematic, and as problematized, as it was in Poèmes saturniens and La Bonne Chanson. In Romances sans paroles, where Verlaine’s lyric subject is more destabilized than ever, he takes a bold step – perhaps as a result of the newfound freedom that Rimbaud inspired – and chooses to enter deeper into the inner chasm that torments his poetry. In these poems, Verlaine’s poetic subject, while in a constant state of being confronted with a choice, bemoans his having to choose rather than actually choosing anything. In this way, this next phase in Verlaine’s poetic subjectivity – one in which a subject who is in crisis does not always seek a resolution – can be seen as an extension of the lack of focus that we have already discussed in the poem “Mon Rêve familier” from Poèmes saturniens. As he writes in “Art poétique” from Jadis et Naguère: “Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise / Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint” [Nothing more dear than the gray song / Where Indecision and Precision meet] (ŒP 326). Verlaine’s subject-in-crisis sometimes laments his condition all alone, and sometimes implicates the object in his situation, as several poems from Romances sans paroles – including the first poem from the first section, “Ariettes oubliées” – will show. For Robichez, Rimbaud’s influence is limited precisely to this section of poems: “Restent les ‘Ariettes oubliées,’ qui seules s’engagent véritablement dans une voie nouvelle et, seules, répondent à la leçon de Rimbaud” [Then there are the “Ariettes

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oubliées,” which alone undertake a new direction and, alone, respond to Rimbaud’s lesson].51 From the very beginning of this poem (ŒP 191), we see Verlaine’s attempt to create a new poetic world. The short seven-syllable lines create a clear and definite rhythm, and the regularity of the anaphora “C’est” steadies the reader with its repetition.52 Furthermore, the reader is struck by the beautiful music of this poem, in particular in the first two verses, where the incredibly rich rhymes of “langoureuse” and “amoureuse” stand in contrast to the flat repetition of the simple syllable “C’est”: C’est l’extase langoureuse, C’est la fatigue amoureuse, C’est tous les frissons des bois Parmi l’étreinte des brises, C’est vers les ramures grises, Le chœur des petites voix. [It is languorous ecstasy, It is amorous fatigue, It is all the shivers of the woods Within the embrace of breezes, It is toward grey branches, The chorus of little voices.]

The first stanza’s content also removes the reader’s familiar points of reference, as it lacks any human presence – besides the source of the deictic phrases – until the hint of “des petites voix” at the end. However devoid of a human presence the first stanza may be, this poem is not one from which “l’homme sera complètement banni,” as the “Ô” that announces the second stanza indicates: Ô le frêle et frais murmure! Cela gazouille et susurre, Cela ressemble au cri doux Que l’herbe agitée expire… 51

Verlaine entre Rimbaud et Dieu: Des Romances sans paroles à Sagesse (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1982), 56. 52 For more information about these deictic phrases, see Joseph Sanchez, “Référence et représentations dans les Romances sans paroles,” 121-35 in Paul Verlaine, ed. Steve Murphy, spec. issue of L’École des lettres 14 (1995-96), especially 124-27.

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Tu dirais, sous l’eau qui vire, Le roulis sourd des cailloux. [Oh the frail and fresh murmur! It chirps and whispers, It resembles the sweet cry That the agitated grass exhales… You might say, under the water that veers, The deaf rolling of stones.]

Although the anaphora of “C’est” and the other ubiquitous deictic phrases such as “Cela,” “Cette,” “ce” – even inverted in “n’est-ce pas” – clearly attribute an importance to the object not previously seen in Verlaine’s poetry, the subject makes its presence known. In fact, an evolution of poetic subject can be seen in this short poem, beginning with its narrative role in the first stanza and then moving to an emotional (“Ô”) and personal (“Tu diras”) one in the second. In the last stanza, Verlaine’s poetic subject once again is defining itself in terms of its object, proposing that the lamenting soul be a shared one: “C’est la nôtre, n’est-ce pas?” Cette âme qui se lamente En cette plainte dormante C’est la nôtre, n’est-ce pas? La mienne, dis, et la tienne, Dont s’exhale l’humble antienne Par ce tiède soir, tout bas? [This soul that laments In this sleeping complaint It is ours, isn’t it? Mine, say, and yours, From which exhales the humble refrain During this warm evening, so softly?]

The irony of this line is that all the certainty and authority that was felt behind the deictic phrases of the first two stanzas is wiped away, the subject needing to rephrase his assertion in the form of a question, literally turning inside-out his initial statement (“C’est” inverted forms the “est-ce” in “n’est-ce pas”). This lack of confidence is nothing short of the poetic subject in crisis, even offering its authority to the non-speaking other with “dis,” a request for someone else to take

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over.53 Finally, the subject and object that are brought together in “C’est la nôtre, n’est-ce pas?” are shown to be separated, in the line “La mienne, dis, et la tienne,” by the slimmest of margins: the consonants “m” and “t” in the possessive pronouns. Le dédoublement […] du pronom possessif “la nôtre” en “La mienne” et “la tienne,” introduit une insistance qui signale ainsi la vague angoisse liée à la fin de l’extase amoureuse, au moment même où le locuteur tente de la conjurer. La fusion des âmes dans la “plainte,” à laquelle le locuteur aspire, relève, me semblet-il, du même désir impossible de maintenir un rapport fusionnel dans ce qui généralement y met un terme. Sentiment difficile à définir, auquel le lecteur donnera le sens qui s’impose à lui. La demande reste sans réponse, conformément à l’indétermination présente dans tout le poème.54 [The doubling […] of the possessive pronoun “la nôtre” into “La mienne” and “la tienne,” introduces an instance that signals a vague anguish linked to the end of the amorous ecstasy, at the very moment when the speaker tries to conjure it. The fusion of souls in the “plainte,” to which the speaker aspires, comes, it seems to me, from the same impossible desire to maintain a multipart relationship in that which is generally resolved one way or another. It is difficult to define this feeling, to which the reader gives the meaning that comes from him/herself. The request remains without response, conforming to the indetermination present throughout the poem.]

The equality between the two is emphasized by the perfect symmetry of the line, each half occupying three syllables on either side of the solicitation “dis.” With the deflation of the subject, the object has risen to occupy the same space and the same importance, and to be an almost perfectly identical match: number, gender, syllables, and pronunciation, just one letter away. In contrast to the regression of poetic subject is the musicality of Verlaine’s poetic language, which grows throughout this poem. The “chœur des petites voix” at the end of the first stanza marks the entrance of noise, which dominates the entire second strophe, continuing from the pianissimo and anonymous “chœur” through the onomatopoetic “murmure,” “gazouille,” and “susurre” to the “roulis sourd des cailloux.” This “ariette” never reaches a real crescendo of noise – the apex of this poem comes in the form of a soft moaning – 53

See Thierry Chaucheyras, “Chant, motif, désir: la persuasion lyrique chez Verlaine,” 19-47 in Verlaine à la loupe, ed. Gouvard and Murphy, especially 26. 54 Sanchez 127.

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but rather softly fades away with the “tout bas” at the end. In addition to all the words that evoke sounds, the music of the words themselves is a major component of this poem. The anaphora and rich rhyme of the first stanza give way, in the second stanza, to stunning alliteration in “frêle et frais,” in “murmure,” and in “susurre,” and the interesting rhyme between these last two words. In the last line, Verlaine’s mastery of poetic language is most evident, for he creates assonance of the words “roulis,” “sourd,” and “cailloux,” and yet undermines – or, more likely, ironically underscores – the importance of this music with the deafness, central to this line (“sourd” sits at its precise midpoint as “dis” does four lines later). The last stanza begins as a celebration of poetic language. After “âme” turns into “lamente,” the repetition of the feminine ending “-te” in “lamente,” “cette,” “plainte,” and “dormante” ushers us from the end of the first line clear through to the end of the second one, right to the question at the heart of this poem: “C’est la nôtre, n’est-ce pas?” Nearly a continuation of the preceding poem, the first line of the second poem in “Ariettes oubliées” (ŒP 191-92) ends with “murmure,” a key word in the first poem. This poem, perhaps more than any other in Romances sans paroles (and perhaps in Verlaine’s entire work), best displays Verlaine’s poetic subjectivity in crisis. Even its first two words are telling; once the initial assertion of presence (“Je”) is complete, the lyric subject begins his slow descent with a verb that betrays any claim he might make to mastering his situation as omniscient subject (“devine”): Je devine, à travers un murmure, Le contour subtil des voix anciennes Et dans les lueurs musiciennes, Amour pâle, une aurore future! [I can make out, amidst the murmurs, The subtle contours of ancient voices And in the musical glimmers, Pale love, a future dawn!]

The musical aspect of Verlaine’s language once again takes center stage, this time from the beginning; the poet follows the murmurs and ancient voices to his vision of a future dawn. In addition, the rhymes of the first stanza are telling; not only does the rhyme

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“murmure”/“future” pale in comparison with “murmure”/“susurre” from the first “ariette,” but the seemingly rich rhyme “anciennes”/“musiciennes” is not as sonorous as it might look at first glance. By definition, the words certainly constitute a rime riche; however, their endings are not equal. Since each line in this poem is nine syllables long, the “-ciennes” ending in “anciennes” is pronounced as one syllable (a process known as syneresis) whereas the same ending in the “musiciennes” is pronounced as two syllables (dieresis): Le con-tour sub-til des voix an-ciennes Et dans les lu-eurs mu-si-ci-ennes,

This dislocated, or syncopated, rhyme, coming at a point where rhyme and meter meet, throws the reader into unfamiliar territory. What’s more, Verlaine’s poem is composed exclusively of feminine rhymes. Even though this poem might not be as rich in internal rhymes and repetitions as the previous poem, it nevertheless offers an equally remarkable poetic subject in free fall. From the “Je” at the onset, the second stanza marks the beginning of the subject’s fragmentation with the mention of the distinct heart and soul (“mon âme et mon cœur”) that are frenzied: Et mon âme et mon cœur en délires Ne sont plus qu’une espèce d’œil double Où tremblote à travers un jour trouble L’ariette, hélas! de toutes lyres! [And my soul and my heart in delirium Are no longer but a kind of double eye Where tremble throughout the troubled day The arietta, alas! of all lyres!]

The trouble, as the next line suggests, is that these parts of the subject’s self now see things differently and can no longer work together as they once did. The loss of a unified poetic self is most problematic, of course, for the poetry, for the “ariette” that trembles at the end of the second strophe. Thus, the move from syneresis to dieresis in the first stanza serves as a harbinger for what will become of the poetic subject; what was once one is now two. That the words at play speak

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of ancient voices and musical glimmers is equally telling; the poetic subject is faced with the crisis of poetic creation, a theme that we have already seen in Poèmes saturniens and La Bonne Chanson. He can barely make out his poetic future through reading the contours of his predecessors and through the music of poetic language. How will he do so when language, like his own sense of poetic subject, betrays him and becomes fractured? The last stanza illustrates the “subject in crisis” that we have previously discussed: Ô mourir de cette mort seulette Que s’en vont, — cher amour qui t’épeures, — Balançant jeunes et vieilles heures! Ô mourir de cette escarpolette! [Oh to die of this lonely little death Where shall pass – dear heart that fears, — Swinging young and old hours! Oh to die of this swing!]

The only solution for the poet, repeated twice in the quatrain, is death. With their repetition of the formula “Ô mourir de cette […],” the first and last lines of this stanza frame the middle two, which are inverted by the arrival first of the verb (“s’en vont”) and then the subject (“jeunes et vieilles heures”). The multiple subjects of young and old hours that sway back and forth are slipping away. The poetic subject is thus confronted with a swinging motion that operates between two polar opposites: between young and old. Insofar as this “ariette” is a poem about poetic creation, the swing represents a choice between old and new (young) kinds of poetry. Even more crucial for Verlaine’s poetry is that it also represents a choice between young and old for the poetic subject, who is once again faced with the dilemma of defining himself. Once chosen, his new poetic subjectivity will necessarily be located somewhere between young and old, between new poetry and old poetry; where will he fall? More to the point, where will he choose to land? As it has been suggested earlier, Verlaine’s poetic subject chooses not to end the poem with a choice; rather, the last line merely repeats the earlier theme, showing no progression on the part of the subject and leaving him stuck in his situation, perhaps for eternity.

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Finally, a similar situation also arises in “Il pleure dans mon cœur” (ŒP 192), as the poem’s last two quatrains indicate: [...] Il pleure sans raison Dans ce cœur qui s’écœure. Quoi! nulle trahison?… Ce deuil est sans raison. C’est bien la pire peine De ne savoir pourquoi Sans amour et sans haine Mon cœur a tant de peine! [There is crying without reason In this heart that disgusts itself. What? No betrayal?… This mourning is without reason. It is surely the worst punishment Not to know why Without love and without hatred My heart is in so much pain!]

The poetic subject’s challenge here – to understand the source of his sadness – is even more difficult than merely coming apart at the seams or facing a choice. Much as with the polar opposites of “jeunes et vieilles heures,” the subject has trouble identifying his saddened heart and situating it within the range of the most common sources of sorrow: “sans amour et sans haine.” Furthermore, the crisis of the poetic subject has a major impact on the language of this poem. From the very beginning, the reader is struck by the powerful repetition of the dominant paronomasia “pleure”/“pleut,” which brings the epigraph55 right into the poem itself. Il pleut doucement sur la ville (Arthur Rimbaud.) Il pleure dans mon cœur [...] 55

Although attributed to him, this phrase appears nowhere in Rimbaud’s work, unless this is a reference to “Avivant un agréable goût d’encre de Chine une poudre noire pleut doucement sur ma veillée” [Arousing a pleasant taste of Chinese ink, a black powder gently rains on my night] (132) from “Phrases,” in Illuminations.

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[Rains falls softly onto the city (Arthur Rimbaud.) My heart is crying]

In addition, the rhyme scheme ABAA adds a level of frustration (always waiting for the second B that never arrives), and the rhyme linking the first and last lines of each stanza is based on the repetition of words (“mon cœur,” “de la pluie,” “sans raison,” “peine”)56. These repetitive structures, along with the repetition of the key words “cœur” and “sans,” all suggest a dearth of vocabulary (not a problem in the other “Ariettes oubliées”), which in turn underscores the lyric subject’s difficulty with poetic expression. But how can one express that which one does not understand? Such, then, are the layers on which this poetic crisis operates; since the poetic subject cannot identify clearly the source of his sadness, it follows logically that he would lack the proper words to describe it. One last example from “Ariettes oubliées” (ŒP 195) combines the reliance of self on other for definition with the subject-in-crisis, this time in the form of questions that are left unanswered. As in the poem just discussed, the repetition of words and phrases – and, in this poem, even an entire couplet (lines 3-4 or 7-8) – here simultaneously evokes a specific music and rhythm and a limited vocabulary, evident from the poem’s first lines: Ô triste, triste était mon âme A cause, à cause d’une femme. Je ne me suis pas consolé Bien que mon cœur s’en soit allé, Bien que mon cœur, bien que mon âme Eussent fui loin de cette femme. Je ne me suis pas consolé, Bien que mon cœur s’en soit allé. [...]

56

On this point see Steve Murphy’s edition of Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles, especially “La poétique de la troisième ariette” (306-14).

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[Oh sad, sad was my soul Because, because of a woman. I am not consoled Although my heart has gone away, Although my heart, although my soul Have fled far from that woman. I am not consoled Although my heart has gone away.]

Here, the poetic subject is divided in two: heart and soul, “cœur” and “âme.” Furthermore, he is defined by his sadness, which so great that it is expressed in two of the first three words of the poem (and, given the lamentation of the “Ô,” his sorrow is the force behind the first three words in a row). In addition to these obvious weaknesses, the sadness is “à cause d’une femme,” and, as such, the poetic subject is being defined by his object – a situation by now familiar to us in Verlaine’s poetry. As tenuous as his condition may be, at least his heart and soul seem to work in tandem in the first part of the poem, in the couplet “Bien que mon cœur, bien que mon âme / Eussent fui loin de cette femme.” However, the extra line break between the fourth and fifth couplets splits the poem in two just as the “cœur” and “âme” start acting independently of each other, setting the stage for the tension that will dominate the poem’s second half, in which “La douleur et la fuite, la présence et l’exil, le présent et le passé, l’orgueil et la tristesse coexistent. La tension est voilée par les allitérations, par les reprises, mais elle ne se dissout pas. Les deux contraires tiraillent toujours le poète qui en reste conscient” [Pain and flight, presence and exile, present and past, pride and sadness coexist. The tension is veiled by the alliterations, by reprisals, but it is not dissolved. The two opposites pull the poet apart but he remains conscious of it]:57

57

Zimmermann 74. However, I disagree with Zimmermann’s overall conclusion: “Cependant l’impression d’ensemble reste une” [Nevertheless the overall impression is one].

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Et mon cœur, mon cœur trop sensible Dit à mon âme: Est-il possible, Est-il possible, — le fût-il, — Ce fier exil, ce triste exil? Mon âme dit à mon cœur: Sais-je Moi même que nous veut ce piège D’être présents bien qu’exilés, Encore que loin en allés? [And my heart, my too sensitive heart Says to my soul: Is it possible, Is it possible, — could it have been, — This proud exile, this sad exile? My soul says to my heart: Do I know Myself what this trap wants of us To be present although exiled, Still long gone?]

The inner dialogue undertaken by the heart and soul exemplifies perfectly this inner crisis of the poetic subject: “Tout le malaise verlainien tient en effet à ce dédoublement, à cette irrémédiable déchirure” [The essence of the Verlainian malaise clings in fact to this doubling, from to irremediable tearing apart].58 Not only is his identity shaken by the fact that he is split into two, but he is also stuck with questions that are difficult to answer. The word “piège” sticks out here, both because it summarizes well the predicament and because of its rhyme with “Sais-je.” As a result, the two line endings in this couplet bring together the trap and the divided subject questioning himself. In keeping with the other “ariettes” that we have discussed, the point of crisis is left unresolved and, to make matters even worse, the first question is answered only by another question. This fractured subject does not know if it is possible to flee, and his heart and soul are similarly unsure of what the trap has in store for them. Finally, as the “piège” is defined, the crisis of subjectivity that is at play in this poem extends to the very existence of the subject, worded in terms of 58

Jean-Pierre Richard, Poésie et profondeur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955), 178.

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his presence or absence (exile). On the one hand, he is far, far away: “Bien que mon cœur, bien que mon âme / Eussent fui loin de cette femme.” But as far as they can distance themselves from the source of their sorrow, they cannot shake it (“D’être présents bien qu’exilés.”) Insofar as the subject is defined by his sadness, he will remain defined by her until he can escape her control; that is, until he can answer the first question and find a way out. This internal voyage, then, might someday take place, but Verlaine’s poetic subject only exists in this poem at the moment it understands the present crisis and its consequences. Much of the section “Paysages belges” from Romances sans paroles focuses on the outside world in an attempt to paint lightly what one sees: snapshots of life in all their clarity and movement: …Verlaine était en poésie un sédentaire de nature, il voyait les choses au repos; Rimbaud au contraire est un animiste-né, tout est pour lui mouvement. C’est pourquoi les Paysages Belges des Romances sans paroles diffèrent nettement des Paysages tristes des Poèmes saturniens. Ceux-ci sont presque immobiles, pris dans une demi-pose favorable à l’expression de la mélancolie, alors que ceux-là sont palpitants de vie, fuyants, frénétiques, poussés par une force magique vers des horizons croulants.59 [Verlaine was in poetry sedentary by nature, he saw things at rest; Rimbaud on the other hand is a born animist, everything for him is movement. This is why the Paysages Belges of Romances sans paroles differ so greatly from the Paysages tristes from the Poèmes saturniens. The latter are practically immobile, taken in a half-pose favorable to the expression of melancholia, while the former are palpitating with life, evasive, frenetic, pushed by a magical force toward crumbling horizons.]

As such, these poems are perhaps as close as Verlaine comes to Rimbaud’s project of “la poésie objective”: “Verlaine ne cède plus ici, comme dans les ébauches de 1867-68, à l’attrait d’un ‘réalisme’ à la Coppée, mais à un souci de ‘modernité’” [Verlaine does not give in here, like in his early attempts from 1867-68, to the attraction of a “realism” like Coppée, but rather to a concern for “modernity”] (ŒP 182). This modernity is hardly limited to French poetry, and it is worth pointing out that the section “Paysages belges” coincides with the rise of French impressionism: 59

Zayed 360.

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En 1869-70, Manet, que Verlaine a connu l’année précédente chez Nina de Callias, modifie sa manière et oriente ses recherches propres dans le sens où la jeune peinture mène les siennes. […] Le voyage que, en 1872, Rimbaud et Verlaine font à Londres, Monet et Pissarro l’ont fait eux-mêmes deux ans plus tôt. L’année où paraît Romances sans paroles (1874) est aussi celle d’Impression et de la première exposition du groupe qui va recevoir de là son nom. (ŒP 183-84) [In 1869-70, Manet, whom Verlaine had met the preceding year at the home of Nina de Callias, modifies his manner and orients his own researches in the direction where the young painting puts its own. […] The voyage that Rimbaud and Verlaine go on to London in 1872, Monet and Pissarro had done it themselves two years earlier. The year in which Romances sans paroles is published [1874] is also the year of Impression and of the first exhibition of the group that will take from it its name.]

In the last section, entitled “Aquarelles,” the project of coldly describing one’s surroundings quickly reverts back to an internalized poetry. In “Green,” the poem’s title invokes as much the poetic subject’s naïve innocence as it does “des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches” [fruits, flowers, leaves, and branches] in its first line. A return to self-definition as a function of the other comes to the foreground in the line “voici mon cœur qui ne bat que pour vous” [here is my heart, which beats only for you]. While this peaceful watercolor does not reproduce the crises of the “Ariettes oubliées,” Verlaine’s poetic subject is still immediately recognizable by its vulnerability, as the next line indicates: “Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches” [Do not tear it apart with your two white hands]. Such vulnerability vis-à-vis the other seems to haunt the poetic subject in “Aquarelles,” with lines like “Je crains toujours, — ce qu’est d’attendre! — / Quelque fuite atroce de vous” [I always fear, — what it is to wait! — / Some atrocious flight you might take] from “Spleen” and “J’ai peur d’un baiser” [I fear a kiss], repeated throughout “A Poor Young Shepherd.” Returning to “Green” (ŒP 205), the subject’s vulnerable nature is left bare, and the third and final quatrain end – surprisingly, perhaps – on a hopeful note of protection: Sur votre jeune sein laissez rouler ma tête Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers; Laissez-la s’apaiser de la bonne tempête, Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez.

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[On your young breast let my head roll Still all buzzing from your last kisses; Let it calm down there from the good storm, And let me sleep a bit since you are resting.]

After the Fall; or, The Subject, the Sacred, and the Profane Verlaine experienced a religious rebirth while in jail in 1874 and, in his writing, his lyric subject took on some religious characteristics: “À la veine chrétienne de l’œuvre, Verlaine s’est d’abord exercé en quelque sorte expérimentalement” [To the Christian vein of his work, Verlaine first tried things out experimentally] (ŒP 219). His original plan of writing a collection of poems entitled Cellulairement had to be abandoned, the poems lacking so greatly a unifying theme.60 At the same time as the poems that would be published under the title Sagesse in 1880, then, Verlaine also wrote poems that found their place in other collections, including Amour, Jadis et Naguère, and Parallèlement. As a result, critics sometimes describe these poems’ unity of thought, other times their lack of unity, even within the same study; after noting that “On s’est souvent étonné du caractère diffus et désordonné des derniers recueils poétiques de Verlaine” [We are often surprised by the diffuse and disorganized character of Verlaine’s last collections of poetry] Ammirati describes the collection Jadis et Naguère as being an “ensemble lui-même composite mêlant les thèmes et les époques” [a composite ensemble, mixing themes and epochs].61 Clearly, in a twist that could be considered ironic in light of the crisis of the poetic subject in “Ariettes oubliées” who cried “Ô mourir de cette escarpolette!,” Verlaine was having trouble choosing a direction for his poetry, resulting in:

60

“On sent Verlaine au point mort, s’essayant, tâtonnant dans toutes les directions, et comme en attente” [One feels Verlaine at death’s door, trying himself, feeling out in all directions, as if on standby] (ŒP 222). 61 Charles Ammirati, “L’Unité du dernier Verlaine,” in Paul Verlaine, ed. Steve Murphy, spec. issue of L’École des lettres 14 (1995-96), 205. Also see Hun-Chil Nicolas, “Autour de la genèse de Jadis et Naguère,” 387-418 in Verlaine à la loupe, ed. Gouvard and Murphy.

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[c]e désarroi, cette désorganisation de l’être que la foi ne réussit pas d’un coup à rassembler, à mettre debout […] Du moins sa poésie n’obéit-elle pas exclusivement à l’élan de la grâce ou aux injonctions d’un dogme. Il y a en elle d’autres velléités, d’autres penchants; Verlaine, entre eux, n’a pas choisi encore. (ŒP 224) [This confusion, this disorganization of self that faith did not succeed in reassembling, in righting […] At least his poetry does not exclusively obey the élan of grace of the injunctions of a dogma. There are other penchants, other leanings; Verlaine, between them, has not yet chosen.]

Verlaine even went so far as to reject the notion of a poetic system, explicitly, in the beginning of a poem from Sagesse: “Parfums, couleurs, systèmes, lois! / Les mots ont peur comme des poules / La Chair sanglote sur la croix” [Odors, colors, systems, rules! / Words are scared like chickens / Flesh weeps on the cross”] (ŒP 281). When the obvious reference to Baudelaire’s “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent” [Odors, colors, and sounds answer to each other] 62 quickly turns into nothing more than a hardened structure (“systèmes, lois”), both poetic language and the poet, here martyrized on the cross, suffer. As the numerous simultaneous directions of his poems stem from differing directions for Verlaine’s subject, poems from this period clearly perpetuate the crisis of the poetic subject. Once again, many critics discuss this uncertainty in strictly biographical terms: “cette incertitude créatrice de Verlaine en prison, signe ou témoin d’une incertitude plus profonde de l’être […] Il n’est pas abusif de dire que, pendant les mois de prison, et plus tard encore, Verlaine se cherche […]” [this creative incertitude of Verlaine in prison, sign or witness of a deeper incertitude of his being […] It is not an overstatement to say that, during his months in prison, and later still, Verlaine is looking for himself] (ŒP 219). According to Rimbaud, Verlaine’s religious zeal was not altogether sincere, and certainly not longlasting. After the two poets last met in Stuttgart in 1875, Rimbaud wrote to his friend Ernest Delahaye: Verlaine est arrivé ici l’autre jour, un chapelet aux pinces… Trois heures après on avait renié son dieu et fait saigner les 98 plaies de N.S. Il est resté deux jours et demi fort raisonnable et sur ma remonstration s’en est retourné à Paris, pour, de suite, aller finir d’étudier là-bas dans l’île.63

62 63

Baudelaire 1:11. Rimbaud, Letter to Ernest Delahaye, 5 March 1875 (296).

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[Verlaine arrived here the other day, carrying rosaries… Three hours later he had renounced his god and reopened the 98 wounds of Our Savior. He stayed two and a half days, quite reasonable and on my remonstration returned to Paris to, right away, finish studying over there on the island.]

Many critics feel that this search for self, which by extension leaves his work to wander in any direction it chooses, marks a weakness of Verlaine’s. Rather than a shortcoming on Verlaine’s part, however, this multitude of directions is an integral – and thus desired – part of the poet’s aesthetic, and one of the major strengths of his poetry from the 1880s. Beginning with the crisis of the poetic subject in Romances sans paroles, Verlaine’s subject – and, in contemporaneous collections such as Sagesse and Jadis et Naguère, Amour and Parallèlement, his subject matter – is intentionally multiple. Instead of Verlaine’s subject not having the strength to choose – which would result in a neat and tidy poem – he leaves the choices open, celebrating the dilemma, and the later body of work is thus a multi-layered one, with the lyric subject having fingers in numerous pots at once.64 In “Je ne sais pourquoi […]” (ŒP 280-81), Verlaine’s subject voices its lack of understanding of just why its mind seems to wander here, there, and everywhere:

64

This multiplicity of stances recalls lines towards the end of Baudelaire’s “L’Héautontimorouménos,” from Les Fleurs du mal: Je suis le sinistre miroir Où la mégère se regarde. Je suis la plaie et le couteau! Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les membres et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau! (Baudelaire 1:78-79) [I am the sinister mirror Where the shrew looks at herself I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the members and the wheel, And the victim and the executioner!]

Verlaine’s Identities

Je ne sais pourquoi Mon esprit amer D’une aile inquiète et folle vole sur la mer, Tout ce qui m’est cher, D’une aile d’effroi Mon amour le couve au ras des flots. Pourquoi, pourquoi? Mouette à l’essor mélancolique. Elle suit la vague, ma pensée, A tous les vents du ciel balancée Et biaisant quand la marée oblique, Mouette à l’essor mélancolique. Ivre de soleil Et de liberté, Un instinct la guide à travers cette immensité. La brise d’été Sur le flot vermeil Doucement la porte en un tiède demi-sommeil. Parfois si tristement elle crie Qu’elle alarme au lointain le pilote Puis au gré du vent se livre et flotte Et plonge, et l’aile toute meurtrie Revole, et puis si tristement crie! Je ne sais pourquoi Mon esprit amer D’une aile inquiète et folle vole sur la mer, Tout ce qui m’est cher, D’une aile d’effroi Mon amour le couve au ras des flots. Pourquoi, pourquoi? [I don’t know why My bitter mind With a wing worrying and crazy flies on the sea, All that is dear to me, With a wing of fright My love broods on it to the brim of flows. Why, why? Gull of melancholic flight. It follows the wave, my thought, To all the winds of the sky thrown And slanting with the oblique tide, Gull of melancholic flight.

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Drunk with sun And with liberty, An instinct guides it through this immensity. The summer breeze Over the rosy current Softly carries it in a warm half-sleep. Sometimes so sadly it yells That it alarms the pilot from afar Then to the whims of the wind gives itself up and floats And plunges, and the murderous wing Flies up again, and then so sadly cries! I don’t know why My bitter mind With a wing worrying and crazy flies on the sea, All that is dear to me, With a wing of fright My love broods on it to the brim of flows. Why, why?]

Nearly all of the verbs in this poem show a lyric subject passively being carried away: “Elle suit”; “Un instinct la guide”; “La brise d’été […] Doucement la porte”; and “Parfois si tristement elle […] au gré du vent se livre et flotte / Et plonge.” In a different context – speaking about Rimbaud’s poem “Patience” –, Bernard Meyer identifies a difference between what he terms passive and active passivity (this poem by Verlaine being an example of the former).65 It is not surprising that discussions of activity and passivity often leave the field of poetry and enter that of biography, as Antoine Fongaro notes in his discussion of Rimbaud’s poem “Antique”: “Si l’on en croit Sade, Verlaine, Proust, les journaux, etc., la plupart des homosexuels sont aptes à l’activité et à la passivité. Cf. ‘Ces passions qu’eux seuls [...]’ de Verlaine (Parallèlement)” [If we are to believe Sade, Verlaine, Proust, the newspapers, etc., most homosexuals are prone to activity and passivity. Cf. “Ces passions qu’eux seuls […]” by Verlaine].66 Rather than being a biographical clue, the passivity in 65

For more on Meyer’s discussion of passive stances, see Bernard Meyer, Sur les Derniers vers: Douze lectures de Rimbaud (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996), especially 97; and my discussion of the same in the next chapter. 66 Antoine Fongaro, De la lettre à l’esprit: Pour lire Illuminations (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 146n12. Fongaro quotes the following stanza:

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Verlaine’s “Je ne sais pourquoi […]” is a stance that shows, convincingly, the lyric subject’s inability to define himself, to decide, and to be in total control of his situation. The repetition in this poem’s structure (the first stanza repeated as the last one) suggests a wandering, a cycle of questions that keeps going around in circles; that this repetition is not perfectly symmetrical – “Mouette à l’essor mélancolique” opens and closes the second stanza, but no such repetition is evident in what would be its counterpart, the poem’s fourth stanza – reflects less a carefully planned structural design than a more freeflowing poetic expression. These poetic irregularities are a far cry from those in Verlaine’s poem, “Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois […]” [Turn, turn, good wooden horses] (originally in Romances sans paroles, subsequently lengthened and reprinted in Sagesse), where a sudden break from the ordered and regular repetition signal a deeper fracturing that sends shock waves down to the poem’s very core.67 Here in “Je ne sais pourquoi […],” the lyric subject is unable to comprehend; his only recourse is to wonder aloud, “Pourquoi, pourquoi?” Rather than offering some neat and tidy reply, answering the question troubling the lyric subject, the poet leaves the question unanswered, the problem unsolved, the subject’s mind doomed to continue wandering forever, as the wind blows (“au gré du vent”). Although most critics consider this lyric subject’s meanderings to be a sign of weakness (often moral weakness, attributed to the poet himself), stemming from a lack of unity on a larger scale, I contend that the zigzag path that Verlaine’s readers follow shows the extent to which the poet problematizes the staid and static lyric subject of the Parnassians in favor of one that is harder to pin down, categorize, or Et pour combler leurs vœux, chacun d’eux tour à tour Fait l’action suprême, à la parfaite extase, — Tantôt la coupe ou la bouche et tantôt le vase — Pâmé comme la nuit, fervent comme le jour. (ŒP 522) [And to fulfill their wishes, each one of them in turn Does the supreme action, to perfect ecstasy, — Be it the cup or the mouth or the vase — Abandoned like the night, fervent like the day.] 67

For more on this poem and the impact of the irregularities in its median stanza, see my “Sagesse, Paul Verlaine,” L’explication littéraire: Pratiques textuelles, ed. Ridha Bourkhis (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006), 185-92.

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label. Further examples from this period of Verlaine’s poetic production include some poems, like “L’espoir luit comme un brin de paille…” (from the third part of Sagesse) which, according to Zayed, resulted from Verlaine’s attempts to follow Rimbaud’s poetics, and was among “quelques essais timides d’hallucinations littéraires” [a few timid attempts at literary hallucination].68 While many critics often read “Art poétique” from Jadis et Naguère as the clear definition of Verlaine’s musical system for poetry, Verlaine himself cautioned against reading too much into it: “[…] n’allez pas prendre au pied de la lettre mon ‘Art poétique’ de Jadis et Naguère, qui n’est qu’une chanson, après tout – je n’aurai pas fait de théorie” [don’t take my “Art poétique” from Jadis et Naguère word for word, it’s nothing but a song, after all – I shall not have created any theory] (ŒP 1074). Later in this same collection, Verlaine devoted a series of poems to other people’s styles, À la manière de plusieurs (ŒP 370-76), straying even farther from any one clear poetic direction that could be attributed to him personally. In Amour, the notion of an unambiguous poetic voice is again rendered problematic, but mostly along gender lines, following a theme that was announced in the “ariette,” “Il faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner les choses…” [It is necessary, you see, to excuse us for these things…] (ŒP 193). With lines like “De cette façon nous serons bien heureuses” [In this way we [feminine plural] will be very happy] and “[…] âmes sœurs que nous sommes” [soul sisters that we are], the poetic subject – like the poem itself, with all of its twelve rhymes being feminine ones – is identified (or self-identified) as feminine. While I insist on the importance of the feminine identification in this poem, I take issue with statements that limit this poem (and others like it) to a purely biographical meaning, like the following comments: Il semble bien [que ce poème] puisse s’interpréter comme une transposition sur le mode féminin des amours des deux poètes. On n’ignore pas combien Verlaine était, et savait qu’il était « un féminin » dans ses amours; et combien d’ailleurs il recherchait dans son compagnon, même plus jeune que lui, l’autorité tantôt dominatrice et grondeuse, tantôt tendre et consolante, d’une mère.69

68 69

Zayed 357. Henri Peyre, Rimbaud vu par Verlaine (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1975), 135.

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[It certainly seems that [this poem] can be interpreted as a transposition on the feminine mode of love of the two poets. We cannot ignore how much Verlaine was, and knew that he was, “a feminine” in his loves; and, what’s more, how much he looked for, from his companion, even younger than he, an authority at once dominating and scolding, sometimes tender and consoling, of a mother.]

Sometimes, the poetic subject presents his self through his appetites, letting his ambiguous actions speak to his multi-faceted personas: “J’ai la fureur d’aimer. Mon cœur si faible est fou. / N’importe quand, n’importe quel et n’importe où” [I have the furor of loving. My heart so weak is crazy. / No matter when, no matter what and no matter where] (ŒP 445). Other times, the poem focuses on a different person who, similarly, resists categorization as either wholly masculine or wholly feminine: Il patinait merveilleusement, S’élançant, qu’impétueusement! R’arrivant si joliment vraiment! Fin comme une grande jeune fille, Brillant, vif et fort, telle une aiguille, La souplesse, l’élan d’une anguille. (ŒP 450) [He skated marvelously, Leaping so impetuously! Then back again so prettily, truly! Delicate like a big girl, Brilliant, lively and strong, like a needle, The litheness, the élan of an eel.]

Similarly, the object about whom the poetic subject creates a portrait is celebrated precisely because he has universal appeal, thereby even making it hard for others to define him: “Tu plaisais aux hommes comme aux femmes” [You were pleasing to men as well as to women] (ŒP 456). If this portrait is not completely accurate (“Ce portrait qui n’est pas ressemblant” [This portrait which is not true to life], the lyric subject tells us), the subject is only partly to blame, since a quick sketch could hardly do justice to such a complicated object. In situating Verlaine’s work within its appropriate literary and historical context, it is important to point out that gender-based complexities exist throughout literature of the nineteenth century, and

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neither are they limited to poetry. Nathaniel Wing discusses Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which the tension of the binary opposition between subject and object, simultaneously between male and female, is a celebration of what Wing calls “plural gender identities.”70 As we read in Gautier: “Ma chimère serait d’avoir tour à tour les deux sexes pour satisfaire à cette double nature […] car le vrai bonheur est de se pouvoir développer librement en tous sens et d’être tout ce qu’on peut être” [My chimera would be to have, one at a time, both sexes to satisfy this double nature […] because true happiness is to be able to develop freely in all directions and to be all that one can be].71 In his excellent analysis of Gautier’s work, Wing arrives at a conclusion that echoes this chapter’s approach to the different stages in Verlaine’s approach to identity of the lyric: “[…] characterized by constant rearticulation, transformation, and supplementation.”72 When the poetic subject can non longer be consistently identified in any one way, and when, concurrently, the object resists easy definition from both the subject and the object’s other admirers, the interactions between subject and object become more and more troubled. Whereas the subject could previously rely on the object for assistance in the process of self-definition, as we have seen, Verlaine’s poems after Romances sans paroles often portray a battle between the two, and passionate battles of love are played out in terms of power, of dominating or being dominated. Such is the case in “Parsifal,” with its military language in which, in the first stanza, “Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil / Babil et la luxure amusante […]” [Parsifal conquered the Girls, their gentle / Prattle and amusing lust], and “Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au cœur subtil, / Étalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante” [He conquered the beautiful Woman, with subtle heart, / Spreading her cool arms and her exciting neck] in the second one (ŒP 427). Amorous relations are also described in terms of words of war in the beginning of the third poem of the series dedicated to Lucien Létinois:

70

Nathaniel Wing, Between Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 45. 71 Mademoiselle de Maupin 353. 72 Wing, Between Genders 46.

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O la Femme! Prudent, sage, calme ennemi, N’exagérant jamais ta victoire à demi, Tuant tous les blessés, pillant tout le butin, Et répandant le fer et la flamme au lointain (ŒP 444) [Oh Woman! Prudent, wise, and calm enemy, Never exaggerating your victory by even half, Killing all the wounded, pillaging all the spoils, And spreading iron and flame far and wide]

It is also worth noting that Verlaine was sensitive to this notion of conquests during and even before the time of Romances sans paroles, as his plan for a collection entitled Les Vaincus (dating back as far as 1868) suggests in this letter from 1873: “Je fourmille d’idées, de vues nouvelles, de projets vraiment beaux. […] La préface aux Vaincus où je tombe tous les vers, y compris les miens, et où j’explique des idées que je crois bonnes” [I’m teeming with ideas, with new views, with really beautiful projects. […] The preface to the Vaincus where I take down all verses, including my own, and where I explain the ideas I think to be good].73 Such was his investment in this project that, in 1871, Verlaine closed a letter to Alphonse Lemerre, publisher of Le Parnasse contemporain, by hoping that their colleagues “[…] ne m’en voudraient pas trop d’être un Vaincu” [would not be too upset at me for being a Vaincu].74 Finally, Verlaine’s poem “Les Vaincus” was reprinted twice after its first publication (as “Les Poètes”) in La Gazette rimée of 20 May 1867, but not before Verlaine doubled the poem’s length from ten to twenty stanzas: once in the second volume of Le Parnasse contemporain and then again in Jadis et Naguère. As the end of the first part suggests, the tension inherent in being a “vaincu” cannot be resolved; rather than challenge it, the Verlainian lyric subject accepts it as it accepts the inevitability of death: Ah, puisque notre sort est bien complet, qu’enfin L’espoir est aboli, la défaite certaine, Et que l’effort le plus énorme serait vain, Et puisque c’en est fait, même de notre haine,

73

Letter to Edmond Lepelletier, Jehonville, 16 May 1873. Correspondance 1:313. This project is the basis on which Jadis et Naguère would be built. 74 Correspondance 1:211; original emphasis. See the discussion of this letter in Steve Murphy, Marges du premier Verlaine.

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Nous n’avons plus, à l’heure où tombera la nuit, Abjurant tout risible espoir de funérailles, Qu’à nous laisser mourir obscurément, sans bruit, Comme il sied aux vaincus des suprêmes batailles. (ŒP 366-67) [Ah, since our fate is quite complete, and that finally Hope is abolished, defeat certain, And that even the most enormous effort would be in vain, And since it is written, even of our hatred, We have nothing more, at the moment when night falls, Renouncing all laughable hope of funerals, Than to let ourselves die obscurely, silently, As it pleases those conquered in supreme battles.]

As Verlaine was putting together the poems that would form the collection Amour (1888), he was simultaneously working on another collection. In its very title, Parallèlement (1889) obviously speaks not to the duality of human beings, and particularly to Verlaine’s internal conflicts, as many critics are quick to point out: “Dans l’homme, dans l’œuvre, il y a bien un effet ‘parallélisme’ ou simultanéité de deux courants, et l’un toujours plus exsangue, plus réduit ou plus vain: ce parallélisme traduit un conflit plus qu’une volonté” [In the man, in his work, there certainly is an effect of “parallelism” or simultaneity of two currents, and one is always more bloodless, more reduced or more vain: this parallelism translates a conflict more than a desire] (ŒP 470). In addition, the collection offers insight into how Verlaine would write poetry after Romances sans paroles: working in several different directions at the same time. (In addition, the title evokes the subject’s identification through its object that we have discussed at length with respect to subjectivity in Verlaine’s poetry; Parallèlement is a logical title for a collection of poems only with respect to the other collection(s) composed at or around the same time.) As he explained to his friend Edmond Lepelletier, he envisioned this collection as part of his post-Rimbaud work: Mon volume: Amour va, j’espère, bientôt paraître […] J’en ai […] un tout autre prêt, assez hardi comme orgiaque, sans trop de mélancolie (ça fait partie de tout un semble dont Sagesse est le frontispice, Jadis et Naguère une partie, le livre

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dont je parle, Parallèlement, une autre partie, et Bonheur, dont il y a une bonne moitié d’achevée, la conclusion.) 75 [My volume Amour will, I hope, soon be published […] I have […] an entirely other one ready, as bold as orgiastic, without too much melancholia (that’s part of a whole thing of which Sagesse is the frontispiece; Jadis et Naguère another part; the book I’m talking about, Parallèlement, another part; and Bonheur, a good half of which is completed, the conclusion).]

For some critics, Parallèlement suffers a certain lack of coherence, as does Sagesse: Son manque de cohésion est plus profond encore et, d’une certaine manière, plus signifiant: il témoigne de l’intime division de l’être et de son impuissance à unifier ses mouvements divers, ou seulement à les maîtriser, à résoudre dans un chant capté des contradictions inconciliables. (ŒP 481) [His lack of cohesion is deeper still and, to a certain extent, more significant: it bears witness to the intimate division of the being and his weakness to unify his diverse movements, or only to master them, to resolve in a song obtained from irreconcilable contradictions.]

But as has been mentioned before, Verlaine’s stance is one of strength, his subject-in-crisis having developed into a divided subject who is simultaneously problematized in different ways. The section “Les Amies” of Parallèlement is also reminiscent of “Il faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner les choses…” from “Ariettes oubliées,” its feminine theme echoed by the exclusively feminine rhymes in all six of the poems. These poems were first published by Baudelaire’s editor Poulet-Malassis in 1867, with Verlaine using the pseudonym Pablo de Herlagnez. Contemporaneous with Poèmes saturniens, the poems from “Les Amies” do not display the tension of Verlaine’s other poems, neither within the poetic subject nor in the interaction between the subject and the object. However, in the “Filles” section of Parallèlement, written much later in Verlaine’s career (the poems appeared in literary journals between 1886 and 1891 [ŒP 1204-05]), the subject-object tension is palpable from the onset, as the first poem, “À la Princesse Roukhine” indicates

75

Letter to Edmond Lepelletier, Paris, 28 November 1887 (to be included in Correspondance générale, ed. Michael Pakenham, vol. 2 [1886-1889], forthcoming).

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(ŒP 490-91). The first stanza announces that this poem is not about any sort of beauty, neither eternal nor ephemeral: C’est une laide de Boucher Sans poudre dans sa chevelure, Follement blonde et d’une allure Vénuste à tous nous débaucher. [It’s one of Boucher’s ugly women Without powder in her hair, Crazily blond and of an allure Dilapidated to debauch all of us.]

And despite the woman’s ugliness, the subject’s relations with her – “Cette crinière tant baisée, / Cette cascatelle embrasée” – give him a sense of entitlement and possession in the next two stanzas: Mais je la crois mienne entre tous, Cette crinière tant baisée, Cette cascatelle embrasée Qui m’allume par tous les bouts. Elle est à moi bien plus encor Comme une flamboyante enceinte Aux entours de la porte sainte, L’alme, la dive toison d’or! [But I believe her to be mine among all, That mane so kissed, That tumbling wave of fire That lit my candle at both ends. She is mine even more still Like a flaming enclosure Around the holy door, Superb golden fleece, breathing life!]

The tension inherent in this attempt at total possession leads Verlaine’s poetic subject, once again, to see himself in a variety of roles in lines from the next stanza, which read: “[…] son chantre et son prêtre, / Et son esclave humble et son maître” [its bard and

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priest, / And its humble slave and its master”].76 Whether sacred or profane, each realm leads him to highs and lows, underscoring the tumultuous project of possession. In “Casta Piana,” the third poem from “Filles,” the feminine object’s ability to transform the roles that her men must play is similarly voiced as a threat to the poetic subject: Tu tournes un homme en nigaud, En chiffre, en symbole, en un souffle, Le temps de dire ou de faire oui, Le temps d’un bonjour ébloui, Le temps de baiser ta pantoufle. (ŒP 492) [You turn a man into simpleton, Into number, symbol, in a breath, The time of saying or doing “yes,” The time of a dazzling “hello,” The time to kiss your slipper.]

Lastly, the parody of Ronsard’s “A sa maistresse” (“Mignonne, allons voir si la rose…” [My sweet, let us see if the rose])77 in the last stanza of “À la Princesse Roukhine” suggests that its theme is merely a sexually and brutally honest version of Ronsard’s original, the theme of carpe diem in “Cueillez, cueillez votre jeunesse” [Gather, gather your youth] becoming “Ô vers ton lit!”: Mignonne, allons voir si ton lit A toujours sous le rideau rouge L’oreiller sorcier qui tant bouge Et les draps fous. Ô vers ton lit!

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More common is the well-defined master-slave power dynamic like the one that Mathilde announces between Julien and herself in Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir: “tu es mon maître, je suis ton esclave, il faut que je te demande pardon à genoux d’avoir voulu me révolter. […] Oui, tu es mon maître, lui disait-elle encore ivre de bonheur et d’amour; règne à jamais sur moi, punis sévèrement ton esclave quand elle voudra se révolter” [You are my master, I am your slave, on my knees I must ask forgiveness for having revolted. […] Yes, you are my master, she said to him still drunk with happiness and love, rule over me forever, severely punish your slave when she wants to revolt] (Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir [Paris: Le livre de poche, 1958], 366). 77 Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 1:667.

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[My sweet, let us see if your bed Still has under its red curtain The bewitching pillow that moves so much And the crazy sheets. Oh to your bed!]

In a similar vein, the poetic subject in Verlaine’s “Ballade Sappho” (ŒP 528) bears characteristics of numerous different roles, from the opening stanza: Ma douce main de maîtresse et d’amant Passe et rit sur ta chère chair en fête, Rit et jouit de ton jouissement. Pour la servir tu sais bien qu’elle est faite, Et ton beau corps faut que je le dévête Pour l’enivrer sans fin d’un art nouveau Toujours dans la caresse toujours prête. Je suis pareil à la grande Sappho. [My soft hand of mistress and lover Passes over and laughs on your dear festive skin, Laughs and enjoys your delight. To serve it you know well that it is designed, And your beautiful body I must undress it To inebriate it endlessly with a new art Always in an always ready caress. I am like the great Sappho.]

Here the subject’s hand bears qualities that evoke both the feminine “maîtresse” and the masculine “amant.” The entire first line hums with the alliteration of the letter “m” and the repetition of the sound “ma,” bringing the roles of mistress and lover even closer. The second and third lines resonate with the repetition in “chère chair” and the [I], and even the entire word “jouit,” in “Rit et jouit de ton jouissement.” The phrase “Je suis pareil à la grande Sappho,” repeated at the close of each of the poem’s stanzas, brings together the poetic and the sexual, and we once again see love described as a battle in the middle of the last stanza, in the lines: “Heureux du triomphe et de la défaite / En ce conflit du cœur et de la tête” [Happy from the triumph and the defeat / In this conflict between heart and head]. The “Envoi” summarizes the numerous roles that Verlaine’s sexualized lyric subject takes on, ranging from royal to poet to pimp:

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Prince ou princesse, honnête ou malhonnête, Qui qu’en grogne et quel que soit son niveau, Trop su poète ou divin proxénète, Je suis pareil à la grande Sappho. [Prince or princess, honest or dishonest, However much they moan and whatever their level, Learned poet or divine pimp, I am like the great Sappho.]

It is worth noting the indifference in these lines, with respect to gender in “Prince ou princesse,” to honesty in “honnête ou malhonnête,” and regardless of others’ grumblings and their status (“Qui qu’en grogne et quel que soit son niveau”). In the end, then, it seems that all these individual roles matter little; whether exalted poetic subject or the curious juxtaposition of divine pimp, this ballad is what is important, as Sappho’s important legacy is her erotic poetry.

Favorite Positions Once Parallèlement was published, Verlaine immediately began working on Femmes (marking a perfect segue, the title “Filles” appears in both collections),78 which would in turn lead to its companion volume Hombres. When it was first published in 1890, Femmes bore the description “imprimé sous le manteau et ne se vend nulle part” [printed under cloak and not for sale anywhere].79 After being reprinted and passed around surreptitiously for years, Femmes and Hombres were only recently recognized as part of Verlaine’s poetic work, as part of the “Œuvres libres” supplement to the 1989 Pléiade edition. In otherwise very solid critical studies, Femmes and Hombres are almost always pushed to the side, with Eléonore Zimmermann’s comments being the exception rather than the rule: “il y a beaucoup à rejeter, incontestablement, dans ces derniers recueils, mais 78

“[…] les dernières pièces de “Filles” sont de 1887 ou 1888; les premiers poèmes de Femmes de 1889, quelques-uns remontent peut-être à 1888” [the last pieces of “Filles” are from 1887 or 1888; the first poems from Femmes from 1889, some perhaps going back to 1888] (ŒP 472). 79 Jean-Paul Corsetti and Jean-Pierre Giusto, eds., Femmes. Hombres, by Paul Verlaine (Paris: Terrain vague, 1990), 15.

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ils mériteraient tout de même, un jour, une étude qui les placerait dans le cadre de la production de toute l’époque d’une part, de la poésie érotique d’autre part” [There is much to reject, incontestably, in these last collections, but they deserve just the same, one day, a study that would place them within the framework of the production of the time period on the one hand, and of erotic poetry on the other].80 Despite their excellent work in bringing these poems to light, Jean-Paul Corsetti and Jean-Pierre Giusto minimize their own contribution even while editing the collections by stating “Femmes comme Hombres sont voués à de petits tirages destinés aux amateurs. Il ne faut donc pas majorer l’importance de ces vers” [Femmes and Hombres were destined for a small print run for amateurs. One must not overstate the importance of these verses].81 Still, certain aspects of these poems can help us understand Verlaine’s work as much as more “serious” poems from, say, Poèmes saturniens or Romances sans paroles. The issues surrounding the poetic subject are compounded by his active participation – playing an active role and experiencing what Minahen has called “the intensified libidinal charge of taking the risk”82 – in the poems’ various sexual situations. Poems from Femmes are certainly intended to arouse their readers, and “Reddition,” which presents what Minahen calls “the object of desire in all its corporeality as well as the often intense emotion of desire and its satisfaction”83 is no exception: Je suis foutu. Tu m’as vaincu. Je n’aime plus que ton gros cu Tant baisé, léché, reniflé, Et que ton cher con tant branlé, Piné — car je ne suis pas l’homme Pour Gomorrhe ni pour Sodome, Mais pour Paphos et pour Lesbos (Et tant gamahuché, ton con), Converti par tes seins si beaux, Tes seins lourds que mes mains soupèsent Afin que mes lèvres les baisent Et, comme l’on hume un flacon,

80

Zimmermann 226. Corsetti and Giusto 27. 82 “Homosexual Erotic Scripting” 120. 83 “Homosexual Erotic Scripting” 125. 81

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Sucent leurs bouts raides, puis mous, Ainsi qu’il nous arrive à nous Avec nos gaules variables. C’est un plaisir de tous les diables Que tirer un coup en gamin, En épicier ou en levrette Ou à la Marie-Antoinette Et cætera jusqu’à demain Avec toi, despote adorée Dont la volonté m’est sacrée, Plaisir infernal qui me tue Et dans lequel je m’évertue A satisfaire ta luxure. Le foutre s’épand de mon vit Comme le sang d’une blessure… N’importe! Tant que mon cœur vit Et que palpite encore mon être, Je veux remplir en tout ta loi, N’ayant dure maîtresse, en toi Plus de maîtresse, mais un maître. (ŒP 1399-400) [I am fucked. You have conquered me. I love only your fat ass so fucked, licked, snuffed, and that your dear cunt so much masturbated, fucked — because I am not the man for Gomorrah nor for Sodom, but for Paphos and for Lesbos, (and how much tongued, your cunt) converted by your breasts so beautiful, your heavy beautiful breasts that my hands weigh until my lips kiss them and, as one sniffs a bottle, suck their nipples stiff, then limp until it comes to us for us with our moody sticks. It is a pleasure of all the devils to copulate while on one’s back like a pimp or a bitch in heat, or like Marie Antoinette and so forth until tomorrow with you, adored despot whose wish is sacred to me, infernal pleasure which is killing me and in which I exhaust myself to satisfy your lewdness. The come flows from my cock

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like blood from a wound . . . It doesn’t matter! As long as my heart lives and as long as my being pulsates, I want to fulfill in every way your law, not having, harsh mistress, in you no longer a mistress, but a master.]84

The opening verse immediately brings together the poetic subject and its object and draws the poem’s reader as close as possible into the scene with the back-and-forth finger-pointing (underscored by the rimes plates in the first six verses) between “je” and “tu.” With the rhyme “vaincu” / “cu,” we are reminded of Verlaine’s project of publishing a collection entitled Les Vaincus, drawing on the importance of conquest and domination in the power struggle between subject and object. This notion of being vanquished can be found throughout Femmes, as in the poem “Régals”: “[…] ton con ainsi qu’à ton cu / Dont je suis l’à jamais vaincu / Comme de tout ton corps, du reste” [your cunt as well as your ass / Of which I am the foreverconquered / Like of your whole body, besides] (ŒP 1400). Once the subject identifies himself as not masculine (“je ne suis pas l’homme / Pour Gomorrhe ni pour Sodome”) but feminine (“Mais pour Paphos et pour Lesbos”), the rhythm established by the rhymes in the beginning of the poem seems to switch from rime plate (AABB) to rime croisée (ABAB). But not entirely; once the subject is won over by his object’s “seins si beaux,” the heavy breasts themselves take over in lines 10-11 and interrupt the rhyme scheme, resulting in the rhyme AABBCCDEDFFE for the first twelve verses. Furthermore, many of the six lines in this section result in enjambments (“mains soupèsent / Afin que” and “les baisent / Et, comme”) or repetitions around the ends of lines (“ton con, / Converti” and “tes seins si beaux, / Tes seins”). That these verses go beyond the traditional limits of a line of poetry suggests a spontaneous train of thought on the part of the lyric subject and reflects this poem’s bubbling over, both with respect to versification and to the numerous sexual acts described. In fact, at the very middle of the poem, the line “C’est un plaisir de tous les diables” introduces a list of sexual positions (a list that marks the poem’s first appearance of rime embrassée, or ABBA), ending 84

Paul Verlaine, Femmes/Hombres. Trans. William Packard and John D. Mitchell (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1977), 109.

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with “Et caetera jusqu’à demain.” Of these, most are well-known: for example, of the word “gamahucher” Guiraud notes: le mot viendrait de Gamahut, assassin guillotiné en 1885; mais, à part la date, rien ne légitime cette étymologie qui est très douteuse. Vraisemblablement, il remonte à gama-ut qui désigne “le son le plus bas de la gamme,” d’où on pourrait inférer un verbe gamahuter au sens de “descendre (passer de l’aigu au grave).” Or c’est bien l’idée de “descendre” qui est à la base des synonymes: V. descendre, descendre au laque, à la cave, à la crèmerie [sic]. L’anglais dit, de même, to go down on somebody. Quant à la forme gamahucher elle pourrait être le résultat d’un croisement avec hucher “crier, appeler à haute voix.” V. aussi gabahoter. Dans l’usage moderne, gamahucher s’emploie le plus souvent pour le cunnilinctus.85 [the word might come from Gamahut, assassin guillotined in 1885; but, besides the date, nothing legitimizes this etymology which is quite doubtful. Most likely, it comes from gama-ut which means “the lowest sound of the scale,” from which one could infer a verb gamahuter with the meaning of “to go down (going from high to low [pitches]).” However, it is truly the idea of “to go down” that is at the base of the synonyms: See to go down, to go down to the lacquer, to go down to the cellar, to the creamery. The English say, in the same sense, to go down on somebody. As for the form gamahucher, it could be the result of crossing with hucher “to yell, to call out loud.” Also see gabahoter. In modern usage, gamahucher is used most often for cunnilingus.]

Others include “en gamin,” which refers to an entire family of sexual positions of straddling, also called “à Dada” or “Vénus Écuyère”; 86 “en levrette,” meaning “doggy-style”; and “de l’épicier,” referring to the missionary position. The one position that is unknown, at least to today’s readers, is “à la Marie-Antoinette.”87 Given the tension between the poetic subject and object that we have already evoked in Verlaine’s poetry, we must not forget all that Marie Antoinette represented, as much a political queen as a sexual woman. The power of the queen is played out in Le Cadran des plaisirs de la Cour, in which the young Chérubin tells the tale of his seduction and sexual initiation at the hands of the queen. In particular, the young man remembers this saying of the queen’s: “‘Les hommes […] dit-elle, 85

Pierre Guiraud, Dictionnaire érotique (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1993), 359. “[G]amin (baiser en). ‘baiser l’homme dessous et la femme dessus’” [kid (to fuck like a). “To fuck with the man on the bottom and the woman on top”] (Guiraud 360). 87 For a complete discussion of the possible meanings of “à la Marie-Antoinette,” see my “‘À la Marie-Antoinette’: L’érotisme bisexuel dans ‘Reddition’,” Revue Verlaine 7-8 (2001), 121-32. 86

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j’en fais comme d’une orange, quand j’ai sucé le jus, je jette l’écorce loin de moi.’ Hélas! J’étais bien cette orange” [Men […] she said, I treat them like an orange; once I’ve sucked out the juice, I throw the peel far away].88 Indeed, it is the combination of Marie Antoinette’s sexual and political positions that create this being who is capable of doing everyone and everything; Chantal Thomas calls her “la superpuissance érotique, le diabolisme politique, de ce ‘monstre femelle’ qu’est la reine Marie-Antoinette” [the erotic superpower, the political diabolism, of this “female monster” that is queen Marie Antoinette]. 89 Not surprisingly, the descriptions of Marie Antoinette as powerful masculinize her, turning this “monstre femelle” into a “monstre bisexuelle”: “une femme qui peut tout est capable de tout; une femme devenue reine change de sexe, se croit tout permis, et ne doute de rien” [a woman who can do everything is capable of anything; a woman who becomes queen changes her gender, thinks she can do anything, and doubts nothing].90 It is on this point that Marie Antoinette is a key figure in “Reddition,” in which Corsetti and Giusto see a blurring of categories: “Le jeu érotique et direct rapproche la femme de l’homme… S’il y a encore un sexe féminin et un sexe masculin, les comportements eux se fondent, le sentiment de la différence s’estompe” [The erotic and direct game brings the woman closer to the man… If there is still a feminine and a masculine, the behaviors melt into one, the feeling of difference disappears].91 While the erotic poems in Femmes and Hombres offer the most direct references to bisexual tendencies, they are mere extensions of Verlaine’s subject-in-crisis, the poetic subject often choosing not to choose. In “Reddition,” the focus on the fine distinction between two opposites comes to the fore in the slippage between “maître” and “maîtresse,” combining the political and sexual

88

Qtd. in Chantal Thomas, “L’Héroïne du crime: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets,” in La Carmagnole des muses: L’Homme de lettres et l’artiste dans la Révolution, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: A. Colin, 1998), 256. 89 Thomas 248. 90 Prudhomme vii. Qtd. in Sarah Maza, “L’image de la souveraine: Féminité et politique dans les pamphlets de l’affaire du Collier,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 287 (1991), 377. 91 Corsetti and Giusto 38.

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realms and blurring the gender identity of the “dure maîtresse.”92 This back-and-forth between masculine and feminine roles is equally evident, and explicit, in the sexual roles played by the partners, as the following lines in “Rendez-vous” from Hombres suggest: “Monte sur moi comme une femme / Que je baiserais en gamin. / Là. C’est cela. T’es à ta main?” [Climb on me like a woman / So that I can straddle you. / There, that’s it. Are you in your hand?] (ŒP 1409). So despite the fact that the title Hombres would suggest that the focus on men (contrary to Femmes), traditionally masculine and feminine characteristics, roles, and positions of all sorts are intertwined throughout the two collections, with varying degrees of harmony or tension. Whereas in the beginning of “Reddition” the poetic subject clearly stated his preference (“je ne suis pas l’homme / Pour Gomorrhe ni pour Sodome, / Mais pour Paphos et pour Lesbos”), he modifies that choice at the end of “Reddition,” preferring a combination of the heretofore feminine “tu” and the typically masculine “maître.” Unlike in many of Verlaine’s other poems in which the lyric subject leaves a question unanswered, the rime embrassée at the end of “Reddition” highlights the fact that this poem has closure. Indeed, the subject’s stated preference for no longer having a mistress but a master (“N’ayant dure maîtresse, en toi / Plus de maîtresse, mais un maître”) is the result of a decision, however troubled the subject’s preference for a feminine object who acts as a master may be. We see a similar combination of masculine and feminine traits in “Filles I”: “T’es un frère qu’est une dame / Et qu’est pour le moment ma femme…” [You are a brother who is a woman / And who is for the moment my wife/woman] (ŒP 536). And in “Pour Rita” (ŒP 1396-97), the slippage between masculine and feminine – specifically, an object who can play either role – meets the familiar vocabulary of battle. After starting out as a skinny woman in “J’abomine une femme maigre, / Pourtant je t’adore, ô Rita” [I loathe a thin woman, / Nevertheless I love you, oh Rita], we learn that Rita, with her man’s waist, can present herself to her admirers either way:

92

For more on the importance of the word “maître,” see Minahen, “Homosexual Erotic Scripting” 123.

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Et sur ta taille comme d’homme Fine et très fine cependant, Ton buste, perplexe Sodome Entreprenant puis hésitant, Car dans l’étoffe trop tendue De tes corsages corrupteurs Tes petits seins durs de statue Disent: “Homme ou femme?” aux bandeurs [And on your waist like that of a man Delicate and even very delicate nonetheless, Your bust, perplexed Sodom Forward then hesitant, For in the too outstretched fabric Of your corrupting corsages Your little breasts hard as statues Say: “Man or woman?” to the erect men.]

Finally, in a manner that recalls the line “Mignonne, allons voir si ton lit” from “À la Princesse Roukhine,” the subject again ushers his object to bed, this time the bed serving as the scene of a battle: Allons, vite au lit, mon infante, Ça, livrons-nous jusqu’au matin Une bataille triomphante À qui sera le plus putain. [Let’s go, quick to bed, my princess, There, let’s let ourselves go until morning A triumphant battle For whoever will be the most whorish.]

Even if Marie Antoinette was sometimes depicted with some of Rita’s androgyny, it should be noted, nevertheless, that she was not always the powerful “monstre femelle” that she has been made out to be. Rather than being “maître” or “maîtresse,” she portrays herself more as the “vaincue” in the court case against her: Lorsque le dernier témoin achève sa déposition, on demande à la reine si elle n’a rien à ajouter pour sa défense. ‘Hier, je ne connaissais pas les témoins, dit elle. J’ignorais ce qu’ils allaient déposer. Eh bien, personne n’a articulé contre moi

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aucun fait positif. Je finis en observant que je n’étais que la femme de Louis XVI, et qu’il fallait bien que je me conformasse à ses volontés.93 [Once the defense rested in its case against her, Marie Antoinette was asked if she had anything to say on her own behalf. The Queen simply stated: “Yesterday I did not know the witnesses. I did not know what they would testify. Well, no one has uttered anything positive against me. I conclude by remarking that I was only Louis XVI’s wife, and I had to submit to his will.”]94

Like the words “maître” and “maîtresse,” the implications of dominance and submission inherent in the words related to “vaincre” have a certain attraction for Verlaine, and on this point we must not forget the poem’s title, “Reddition.” Perhaps more than any other name, “Marie-Antoinette” conjures up numerous meanings from almost every conceivable aspect of politics and sexuality. Her rumored insatiable bisexuality makes the queen the perfect woman for a poem in Femmes, and her political role makes her perfect for “Reddition,” a poem that is as much about giving up as it is innumerable sexual positions, the roles of “vainqueur” and “vaincu” and everything in between.

Toward an Aesthetic of Decay In keeping with this chapter’s emphasis on an aesthetic of a destabilized poetic subject, we close our discussion of Verlaine with the one word we have yet to use to describe his subject’s condition: decay. Verlaine’s sonnet “Langueur” (ŒP 370-71), originally published in Le Chat noir on 26 May 1883, is often considered to be one of the first appearances of the common use of the notion of decadence, even though there existed “a highly articulate decadent sensibility in Le Chat noir long before [that date].”95 Later claimed as the source for 93

Qtd. in Evelyne Lever, Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1991), 656. 94 Qtd. in Evelyne Lever, Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 301. 95 Philip Stephan, “Decadent Poetry in Le Chat noir before Verlaine’s ‘Langueur’,” Modern Language Quarterly 30.4 (December 1969), 536. See also A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830-1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958).

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“l’école décadente” in French letters, the appearance of the word “décadence” in Verlaine’s poem’s opening line (“Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence” [I am the Empire at the end of the decadence]) hardly sparked a polemic, unlike another publication on the very same day, that of Marie Krysinska’s poem “Le Hibou” in La Vie moderne, which led to the vers libre debate between Krysinska and Gustave Kahn. Besides Verlaine’s “Langueur,” numerous other sources of decadence, explicit and implicit, appeared before and during the mid1880s. “Jules Laforgue, dès le début de 1882, emploie le mot pour caractériser, avec éloges, l’état d’esprit des jeunes” [Jules Laforgue, as early as the beginning of 1882, used the word to characterize, with praise, the state of mind of the young].96 Baudelaire is certainly an important precursor to fin-de-siècle decadence, particularly as seen in Gautier’s preface to the 1868 posthumous edition of Les Fleurs du mal.97 Finally, Huysmans’s novel A rebours (1884) is notable for its perfectly decadent main character, Des Esseintes.98 Similar to the dispute over the invention of French free-verse poetry, the precise beginning of French literary decadence is not as interesting to this study as is the extent to which Verlaine’s poetry suggests decadence. As the lyric subject is fractured, troubled, or divided in different ways throughout the various phases of Verlaine’s poetic career: Cette formation littéraire en perpétuelle gestation lui a permis de se renouveler sans cesse. Trait admirable de son génie, chaque recueil […] est une tentative de renouvellement, ce qui est tout à son honneur et dénote un esprit fécond et multiforme, une originalité éclatante.99

96

Martino 144. For the Baudelairian sources of the decadent aesthetic, see Claude Zissmann, “Verlaine décadent,” 331-36 in Verlaine à la loupe, ed. Gouvard and Murphy. 98 For more on the sources of French literary decadence, see Carter, especially “The Perverted Legend” (3-25), and Louis Marquèze-Pouey, Le Mouvement décadent en France (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986), 15-20. Marquèze-Pouey presents all the origins, debates, and publications that surrounded the Decadent movement, from La Nouvelle Rive Gauche and Lutèce in 1882 to Gabriel Vicaire and Henri Beauclair’s Les Déliquescences d’Adoré Floupette in 1885 and Anatole Baju’s journal Le Décadent in 1886. 99 Zayed 383. 97

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[This literary training in perpetual gestation permitted him to reinvent himself without stopping. An admirable trait of his genius, each collection […] is an attempt at renewal, which is entirely to his credit and which denotes a fertile and multiform mind, a dazzling originality.]

The process that the subject undergoes, particularly with respect to the unity and confidence of the Parnassian subject, is one of decay. As a result, Verlaine’s aesthetic of the lyric subject who is coming apart at the seams not only announces a clear break with Parnassian poetry but also marks an important step in the direction of the decadent literature of the fin de siècle. Since decadent literature relies heavily on the erosion of traditional differences and boundaries between categories,100 the consequences for the previously neatly categorized Romantic/Parnassian lyric subject are wholly consistent with the degeneracy of the lyric subject in Verlaine’s poetry. Furthermore, as the unity of the lyric subject is troubled, the unity of the masculine – the clearly defined masculine of Parnassian poetry – is similarly troubled. In particular, the slippage between previously rigid gender roles – which we have seen to be prevalent throughout Femmes and Hombres – fits perfectly with the decadent aesthetic: “The literature of decadence […] is everywhere furnished with entities or activities that violate conventional categorical distinctions as well as our sense of boundaries. A main locus of activity here is gender categories.”101 Once again the temptation to blur the lines between poetry and biography is sometimes too great, as Robichez reads the fractured lyric subject in “Langueur” as a mirror of Verlaine himself: “Solitude, ennui, impuissance morale, ce poème, dont l’école décadente devait se réclamer avec insistance, est peut-être au cœur des tourments secrets de Verlaine” [Solitude, ennui, moral weakness, this poem, to which the decadent school claimed with insistence to adhere, is perhaps at the heart of Verlaine’s secret torments].102 In keeping with our focus throughout this chapter, we prefer to restrict our reading of the poems to what the poems say about their lyric subject, and not to speculate as to what they might say about the author who may or may not be 100

Mark A. Schneider, “Cultural Studies as Fin-de-Siècle Culture,” in Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, ed. John Mohr and Roger Friedland (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141. 101 Schneider 141. 102 Robichez, ed. 649.

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reflected in the poem’s subject. The decadent lyric subject in “Langueur” breaks down and approaches the limits of linguistic expression, thus the limits of its very lyricism: “Plus rien à dire!” [Nothing more to say!] (ŒP 371). His lyric subjectivity having run aground after its numerous reincarnations, Verlaine essentially paves the way for a poetics no longer based on the lyric mode; that is, no longer a function of a subject expressing itself through poems. Such poetics would not be Verlaine’s to create, but the debt of those who follow in the trail he blazed would forever be great.

Chapter Three Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space

In “À une Raison,” Rimbaud rejects all conventional understanding of time, putting into the words of children the following charge: “Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps” [Change our fate, overcome the plague, and begin with time].1 Space is equally annihilated elsewhere in Illuminations: in “Villes” (“L’acropole officielle [...]”), for example, the lyric subject completely undoes any signifying capabilities of architecture; as Jacques Plessen explains: [...] l’espace morcelé et les détails architecturaux isolés vivent leur propre vie, insoucieux de leurs liens avec les autres parcelles de l’espace et les autres détails. La verticale ignore l’horizontale et si le haut est encore senti comme hauteur, il n’est plus mis en relation avec un bas. Tout rapport entre les choses qui pourrait les réunir dans une structure a disparu: ce monde est le monde inhumain de la schizophrénie, où a été pratiquée l’ablation d’un je qui aurait pu lui donner un sens (et le mot sens doit être pris dans ses deux acceptions de direction et signification: les perspectives s’y contredisent et l’architecture y a perdu toute fonction humaine).2

1

Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. Antoine Adam. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 130. All references to Rimbaud’s work come from this edition unless indicated otherwise. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Rimbaud come from Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie, revised edition Seth Whidden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 2 Jacques Plessen, Promenade et poésie. L’expérience de la marche et du mouvement dans l’œuvre de Rimbaud (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1967), 209; original emphasis. In his excellent study of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Roger Little concurs: “From the outset, we are invited to imagine architecture on a vast scale almost defying conceptualisation” (Rimbaud, Illuminations [London: Grant & Cutler, 1983], 55).

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[Space broken up into pieces and isolated architectural details live their own lives, without care for their link with the other parcels of space and other details. The vertical ignores the horizontal and if the high is still felt as a height, it is no longer in relation to a low. All rapport between things which could unite them in a structure has disappeared: this world is the inhuman world of schizophrenia, with the removal of a je that could have given it a meaning/direction (and the word sens must be understood in its two definitions of direction and meaning: the perspectives contradict each other and architecture has lost all human function).]

How can such a young poet (no older than twenty when he wrote the poems of Illuminations) arrive at such extremes and lay waste to so much grounding of traditional conceptions of time and space, essentially reinventing a new poetic universe? In the case of Rimbaud, as we shall see, a lyric subject incapable of situating itself in space3 stems from the poet’s categorical refusal of the lyric subject as it was previously known and his pushing the limits of its existence in matters of both time and space. One of the primary aims of this chapter is to follow temporal and spatial traces in Rimbaud’s poetry and consider the varying extent to which they reflect, or diverge from, the norms of our world. That he did so in response to the Parnassian mode of poetry of his day is not so surprising; like many young artists, rebellion against the popular movement of the day – especially a neo-classical one like le Parnasse – is almost commonplace. Before his refusal of the static categories that were so prevalent in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, however, one of the first steps in Rimbaud’s poetic output came on 24 May 1870, when he enclosed “Sensation,” “Ophélie,” and “Credo in unam” in a letter to one of the leaders of the Parnassian poets, Théodore de Banville. “Si ces vers trouvaient place au Parnasse contemporain?” [If these verses found a place in the Parnasse contemporain?] (237) he unsuccessfully requested, referring to the Parnassian collection of poems that had already appeared in two volumes and of which a third one was forthcoming. Less than a year

3

The phrase comes from Paule Lapeyre: “un je incapable de structurer l’espace et de se situer dans l’espace” [a “je” incapable of structuring space and situating itself in space]. Le vertige de Rimbaud (Neuchâtel: À la baconnière, 1981), 39.

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later, inspired by events of the Paris Commune,4 the young poet wrote the two pieces of correspondence, railing against that same Parnassian poetry: letters that have come to have an enormous impact in assuring his place among the great French poets. Called the Lettres du voyant of 13 and 15 May 1871, these letters offer their reader a glimpse of Rimbaud’s poetic project in his own words, and as a result studies of Rimbaud’s poetry always take these documents into account. 5 The first letter, addressed to Rimbaud’s former teacher Georges Izambard, is brief in comparison to the second, but no less important. Rimbaud begins by mocking Izambard’s profession and his duties: “Vous roulez dans la bonne ornière” [You move along in the right track] (248). Written at the time of the Commune, Rimbaud’s attack against the traditional routine of work and remuneration is no less poignant: “[...] tout ce que je puis inventer de bête, de sale, de mauvais, en action et en paroles, je leur livre: on me paie en bocks et en filles. [...] Travailler maintenant, jamais, jamais; je suis en grève” [I serve them with whatever I can invent that is stupid, filthy, mean in acts and words. They pay me in beer and liquor. [...] Work now? – never, never, I am on strike] (248). But the rest of this short document touches on Rimbaud as he sees himself, becoming not only a poet, but a voyant. First, he distances himself from his teacher: “[...] votre poésie subjective sera toujours horriblement fadasse. Un jour, j’espère – bien d’autres espèrent la même chose, – je verrai dans votre principe la poésie objective, je la verrai plus sincèrement que vous ne le feriez!” [your subjective poetry will always be horribly insipid. One 4

For the impact of the Commune on Rimbaud’s work and the larger questions of nineteenth-century social thought, see the excellent study by Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 5 Among the numerous studies of these letters, Gérald Schaeffer’s edition (Lettres du voyant (13 et 15 mai 1871), by Arthur Rimbaud [Geneva: Droz, 1975]) is the most indepth, and his faithful reproduction of the various typographic elements of the letters, combined with his line-by-line reading of nearly every single word, make his study essential for any understanding of these two letters. Other studies worth noting are those by Dednam; Dillman (particularly pages 8-43); Felman; Guyaux (“Trente repliques à ‘Je est un autre,’ petite phrase”); Noël; Nykrog; Paliyenko (“Discourse of the Self and Rimbaud’s ‘Lettres du voyant’: Alterity as a Creative Discourse”); Peschel (“Rimbaud’s Response to Plato: The ‘Lettre du Voyant’ and ‘The Republic’”); Richter (particularly pages 36-50); and Schoenfeld. See bibliography for complete information.

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day, I hope – many others hope the same thing – I will see objective poetry according to your principle, I will see it more sincerely than you would!] (248).

“la poésie objective” In these letters, Rimbaud (not yet seventeen years old at the time) presents his poetic project in his notion of poésie objective. Based on his consideration of poetic subjectivity summed up in the phrase “je est un autre” [I is someone else] (249 and 250, respectively), Rimbaud compares his view of poetry to the tradition of subjective French poetry that preceded him. Specifically, it goes to the heart of the core of the romantic tradition, ridiculed for its perceived insipid subject. Rimbaud was hardly the only writer who abhorred the limitations that the lyric represented in its most traditional sense; in this regard, Rimbaud recalls Nietzsche’s goal, discussed earlier in this study, of railing against the “subjective,” or “bad” artist (28). Rather than a return to classical modes of poetic expression, Rimbaud’s letters show his reaction to Parnassian poetics and to the heightened importance they attribute to the role of the poetic subject. Marc Eigeldinger notes the following about the prevalence of artistic intertextuality in Parnassian poetry: L’intertextualité picturale [...] se réfère à une autorité de la tradition ou de l’art contemporain. Elle revêt la valeur d’une caution et d’un stimulant à travers lesquels le narrateur engage la subjectivité de sa vision et son interprétation, tout en cherchant à instaurer une complicité avec le lecteur par l’intermédiaire du référent plastique.6 [Pictorial intertextuality [...] refers to an authority of tradition or contemporary art. It dons the value of a down payment and of a a stimulant through which the narrator engages the subjectivity of its his vision and his interpretation, all the while seeking to instill a complicity with the reader by the intermediary of the plastic referent.]

6

Marc Eigeldinger, “L’inscription de l’œuvre plastique dans les récits de Gautier,” in Théophile Gautier, l’art et l’artiste: Actes du colloque international, 2 vols. (Montpellier: Société Théophile Gautier, 1983), 2:301.

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Antithetically, it is precisely the ability to see beyond the limits of Rimbaud’s personalized vision of the world that distinguishes the voyant from other poets. Furthermore, Rimbaud’s voyant is less the source of poetic expression than the filter through which objects are expressed through poetic language. For this reason, the voyant is compared to musical instruments in the two letters, each time immediately following Rimbaud’s statement “je est un autre,” “Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon” [It is too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin] (249) in the first and “Si le cuivre s’éveille clairon il n’y a rien de sa faute” [If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault] (250) in the second. In fact the entire paragraph in the second letter contains a description of “je est un autre” in musical terms: “Car Je est un autre. Si le cuivre s’éveille clairon, il n’y a rien de sa faute. Cela m’est évident: j’assiste à l’éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l’écoute: je lance un coup d’archet: la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d’un bond sur la scène” [For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap] (250). The use of reflexive verbs in the two sentences that follow “je est un autre” is important because it underscores the passivity of the raw material that is shaped. Just like the wood and the brass that find themselves turned into instruments of musical expression, Rimbaud is awakened to find that he has become a voyant; equally a medium for artistic expression, the voyant is, like a musical instrument, the vehicle through which objects are poetically transposed. In the first letter, he distances himself from the overly narrow subjectivity that dominates Izambard’s poetry; in the second one, Rimbaud comments on many of the Romantic poets who preceded him: “Les premiers voyants ont été voyants sans trop bien s’en rendre compte” [The first romantics were seers without wholly realizing it] and “Les seconds romantiques sont très voyants” [The second Romantics are very much seers] but “Musset est quatorze fois exécrable pour nous” [Musset is fourteen times loathsome to us].7 It is also important to consider that Rimbaud’s thoughts on subjectivity are not 7

253. Among the “premiers romantiques,” Rimbaud cites Lamartine and Hugo; the “seconds romantiques” include Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Banville, and Baudelaire.

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directed solely at the Romantics but at the larger tradition they adopted, including Rousseau’s Promenades.8 In contrast to the poetry of Musset and others like him, Rimbaud’s idea of objective poetry involves the questioning of the source of enunciation, the “je” in the poem, throughout the poetic work. As a result of this questioning, the traditional roles of subject and object are sometimes reversed, other times made difficult to decipher, and always challenged. Such problematizing of the traditional roles of the subject and object creates problems for the reader of the poem. As Adrianna Paliyenko wonders, How can we name the Rimbaldian sujet when [...] je does not say what it means nor mean what it says? To paraphrase Rimbaud, je is thought and spoken by an Other. [...] In Rimbaldian poetics evolving from the voyant letters to the Illuminations, je is no longer solely a persona, a narrator, or a voice; rather, “I” is a dialectic signifying relation that blurs the antinomy between self and Other by positioning poetic voice on the boundary of the subject and the object.9

This is not to say, however, that Rimbaud’s notion of objective poetry will be made up of poems completely devoid of a subject, which would be a precursor to Stéphane Mallarmé’s call, discussed in an earlier chapter of this study, for “la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots”; rather, Rimbaud’s subject is continually put into question. As Karin Dillman notes about the sentence “je est un autre,” “the subversion of subjective poetry is initiated by a conscious subject which is highly visible in the strong repetition of a ‘je’.”10 Therefore, in “je est un autre,” Rimbaud places the emphasis on the “je” not as a source of the verb “être” but rather as an object that is described by that verb. As a result, the object necessarily plays a new role in Rimbaud’s poésie objective: its description comes from a poetic subject that is somehow “other” requires as much. In other words, “ce privilège accordé à l’objet de sensation et de langage 8

I am grateful to Yann Frémy for discussing this aspect of Rimbaud with me. For more on Rousseau’s impact on nineteenth-century French letters, see Dennis Porter, Rousseau's Legacy: Emergence and Eclipse of the Writer in France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 9 Adrianna M. Paliyenko, Mis-Reading the Creative Impulse: The Poetic Subject in Rimbaud and Claudel, Restaged (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 41-42. 10 Karin J. Dillman, The Subject in Rimbaud: From Self to “Je”. Romance Languages and Literature 23 (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), 22.

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n’implique pas pour eux la disparition pure et simple du sujet au profit d’une improbable objectivité, mais plutôt sa transformation” [this privilege given to the object of feeling and language does not imply for them the pure and simple disappearance of the subject to the detriment of an improbable objectivity, but rather its transformation].11 As we will see, in the phrase “je est un autre” Rimbaud situates the lyric subject not only as an other, but also in another place: in a place that is other, particularly in terms of time and space.

“le dérèglement de tous les sens” Both of Rimbaud’s Lettres du voyant contain the poet’s explanation of his poetic project: “il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens” [It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses] (249) in the first letter, “Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” [The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses] (251) in the second.12 The “tous les sens” at the end of these sentences refers in no small part to Baudelaire, “le premier voyant, roi des poètes, un vrai Dieu” [the first seer, king of poets, a real god] (253), for whom the synesthesia of the senses is perhaps best portrayed in his famous line “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent” [Scents, colors and sounds answer to each other]. Rimbaud calls upon the senses by their disorganization, their de-regimenting, thus amplifying and surpassing Baudelaire’s investigation of their points of convergence and divergence. It is important to point out that, as Steve Murphy has discussed, the key word to the phrase in the letter from 15 May is “raisonné,” as it highlights the extent to which Rimbaud’s poetic project is a reasoned and deliberate one, rather than a random disordering for chaos’s sake: 11

Michel Collot, La matière-émotion (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), 42. 12 It is worth noting that these famous phrases have, since their first appearance, been an oft-cited part of literary calls to arms; as André Breton writes in the second Surrealist manifesto, “[...] et nous voici de nouveau, [...] à tenter d’affranchir définitivement cette imagination par le ‘long, immense, raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’ et le reste” [and here we are again, […] trying to liberate this imagination by the “long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses” and all the rest] (124).

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Cette notion d’un dérèglement raisonné, d’une pensée chantée et comprise, montre à quel point Rimbaud tente non pas de casser le Romantisme, mais de le transcender par une déconstruction en spirale grâce à laquelle il peut récuser en même temps les blandices aristocratiques ou bourgeoises de l’Art pour l’Art et le 13 tout-intuitif sentimental du Romantisme prototypique. [This notion of a rational derangement, of a thought sung and understood, shows to what point Rimbaud tries not to break with Romanticism, but to transcend it by a spiraling deconstruction thanks to which he can at the same time challenge the bourgeois or aristocratic seductions of l’art pour l’art and the sentimental allintuitive prototypical Romanticism.]

It is worth noting that in the second letter, Rimbaud’s phrase is itself modified by adjectives suggesting its vastness: “le long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.” The choice of “long” is particularly fitting as it refers to both time and space; and it is perhaps worth recalling that “immense” is from the Latin immensus, “qui ne peut être mesuré” [which can be measured].14 As this chapter will show, Rimbaud creates a poetic universe that is immensus; like everything in it, this new world cannot be described by conventional terms of time or space. The word “sens” contains several other means for Rimbaud to go beyond the Baudelairian notion of synesthesia. As its definition indicates, “sens” can be taken to mean the equivalent of the English words “senses,” “meanings,” and “directions”: “1º Appareil qui met l’homme et les animaux en rapport avec les objets du dehors; [...] 17º Signification, manière de comprendre; [...] 21º Direction” [1º An apparatus that puts man and animals in relation to external objects; [...] 17º Meaning, manner of understanding; [...] 21º Direction].15 In 13

Stratégies de Rimbaud 11. Jean Dubois, Henri Mitterand, and Albert Dauzat, Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français (Paris, Larousse, 1995), 384. In his edition of the two letters, Schaeffer points out that the presence of the verb “se faire” also contains “une signification dynamique et temporelle” [a dynamic and temporal meaning] (164). 15 Littré, s.v. “Sens.” Other critics have mentioned the polysemy of the word “sens”; see for example “à prendre dans tous les sens du mot ‘sens’ […] significations (linguistiques), directions (géographiques), sensations (charnelles et physiologiques), — les unes comme les autres sont sans exception soumises à l’épreuve du renversement et à la quête du déséquilibre […]“ [to take in all the meanings of the word “sens” […] significations (linguistic), directions (geographic), sensations (carnal and 14

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his discussion of the term “ek-stase” as a mode of subjectivity that is other, Maurice Merleau-Ponty draws on these multiple meanings of the word in a manner that recalls Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens”: Sous toutes les acceptions du mot sens, nous retrouvons la même notion fondamentale d’un être orienté ou polarisé vers ce qu’il n’est pas, et nous sommes ainsi toujours amenés à une conception du sujet comme ek-stase et à un rapport de transcendance active entre le sujet et le monde. Le monde est inséparable du sujet, mais d’un sujet qui n’est rien que projet du monde, et le sujet est inséparable du monde, mais d’un monde qu’il projette lui-même. Le sujet est être-au-monde et le monde reste “subjectif” puisque sa texture et ses articulations sont dessinées par le mouvement de transcendance du sujet.16 [Under all the definitions of the word “sens,” we find the same fundamental notion of a being oriented or polarized toward what he is not, and we are thus always led to a concept of subject as “ek-stase” and to a relationship of active transcendence between the subject and the world. The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but projection of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that he projects himself. The subject is being-in-the-world and the world remains “subjective” since its texture and articulations are drawn out by the subject’s transcendent movement.]

Disrupting “les sens,” disrupting the “le monde”: Rimbaud’s approach thus attempts to bring about a new poetic world for the lyric subject by attacking it at its base: all senses, meanings, and directions on which it is built. As a result, precious few things will mean what they might seem to mean, in this new topsy-turvy poetic universe. In addition to merely disorganizing the five senses, then, Rimbaud brings chaos to traditional forms of absolutes which had gone unquestioned; after questioning the subject and object in “je est un autre,” he attacks traditional “x means y” modes of meaning. How can a poet, whose literary work depends – at least to some extent – upon the transmission of meaning through the words of his poems, begin by setting out to unsettle meaning? In his discussion of Saussurian linguistics, Jacques Lacan was sensitive to this very question, and it is precisely physiological), — all of them without exception subjected to the test of being reversed and the quest of unsteadiness] (Felman 11). However, none has developed fully the importance of this word within the larger context of Rimbaud’s entire poetic project, as this study attempts to do here. 16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 491-92.

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the numerous levels inherent to language that give it an edge and accord it a special role in surpassing the typically horizontal signifying function of language: Mais la linéarité que F. de Saussure tient pour constituante de la chaîne du discours, conformément à son émission par une seule voix et à l’horizontale où elle s’inscrit dans notre écriture, si elle est nécessaire en effet, n’est pas suffisante. Elle ne s’impose à la chaîne du discours que dans la direction où elle est orientée dans le temps, y étant même prise comme facteur signifiant dans toutes les langues où : [Pierre bat Paul] renverse son temps à inverser ses termes. Mais il suffit d’écouter la poésie […] pour que s’y fasse entendre une polyphonie et que tout discours s’avère s’aligner sur les plusieurs portées d’une partition.17 [But the linearity that F. de Saussure takes for constituting a chain of discourse, conforming to its emission by a sole voice and to the horizontal where it enters into our writing, if it is in fact necessary, is not sufficient. It only enters into the chain of discourse by the direction in which it is oriented in time, being taken there as a significant factor in all the languages where: [Pierre hits Paul] reverses its time to inverse its terms. But one has but to listen to poetry [...] to hear its polyphony and so that all discourse proves to line up along the several staffs of a sheet of music.]

While Lacan’s focus is on the sounds of words (“une polyphonie”), the semantic level that has been discussed so far here is yet another layer of poetic language’s texture, and as a result it is possible to see it as an extension to Lacan’s comment on poetry, giving it extra strength where this study’s interest in the polysemy of Rimbaud’s use of the word “sens” is concerned. With “sens” meaning directions, Rimbaud literally seeks to dislocate the four compass points representing the foundation upon which everything, indeed the entire world, is based. As Merleau-Ponty has shown: Il faut que le sens même de l’objet, – ici le visage et ses expressions – soit lié à son orientation comme le montre assez la double acception du mot ‘sens’. Renverser un objet, c’est lui ôter sa signification … l’orientation dans l’espace n’est pas un caractère contingent de l’objet, c’est le moyen par lequel je le reconnais et j’ai conscience de lui comme d’un objet.18

17

Jacques Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud” [1957] Écrits I (Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 1966), 260-61; emphasis added. 18 Merleau-Ponty 292-93.

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[The very meaning of the object – here the face and its expressions – must be linked to its orientation like the double definition of the word “sens” shows. Upending an object is removing its meaning … an object’s orientation in space is not a contingent characteristic of the object, it is the means through which I recognize it and I am conscious of it as an object.]

Merleau-Ponty explains further: “L’être n’a de sens que par son orientation” [A being only has meaning by its orientation].19 Consequences for the lyric subject and object, to be sure, and consequences for the reader as well: faced with Rimbaud’s poetic project the reader is meant to employ a multitude of possibilities (“tous les sens” in the plural) and to consider them all, thereby celebrating a refusal of traditional logic preferring precision and unity of thought. In this dense phrase, then, Rimbaud subversively reacts against and seeks to bring complete disorder upon the house of French poetry, calling upon all senses, hinting at all meanings, and going in all directions. As he would later write in “Délires II. Alchimie du Verbe” of Une saison en enfer: “[…] je me flattai d’inventer un verbe poétique accessible, un jour ou l’autre, à tous les sens” [I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses] (106). Furthermore, an approach to his poetic language is further evident in the somewhat legendary story in which Rimbaud describes Une saison en enfer to his mother, saying “J’ai voulu dire ce que ça dit, littéralement et dans tous les sens” [I meant what it says, literally and in all directions/meanings].20 Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens” puts into question not only the numerous possibilities of the word “sens” but also, by extension, everything that relies on aspects of meaning, of senses, and of directions. It is with the phrase “dérèglement de tous les sens” in mind that this study examines the effects of Rimbaud’s poetic project on certain constructs that traditionally depend on directions and meanings, notably time and space. Though Romantic and Parnassian poetry is in large part a function of the personalized vision of its poetic subject, the poetics of the voyant instead seeks to see its object and its form as they appear. As Rimbaud says, the poet “[...] devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions; si ce qu’il rapporte de là19

Merleau-Ponty 529. This sentence is attributed to Rimbaud his sister Isabelle (Isabelle Rimbaud, Reliques, 2nd ed, Paris [Mercure de France, 1921], 143). 20

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bas a forme, il donne forme; si c’est informe, il donne de l’informe. Trouver une langue” [will have to have his inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. A language must be found].21 Like the word “forme” itself, this sentence can be applied to several different aspects of poetry. For strictly formal questions of Rimbaud’s poetics, there is clearly a departure from the Parnassian preference for classical prosody, a desire to break with tradition and if not a disrespect, then a lack of concern for the traditional forms (sonnet, ode, etc.) that were so cherished by his predecessors. Earlier in the second letter, Rimbaud speaks to the Parnassian return to Ancient Greece by saying, “L’étude de ce passé charme les curieux: plusieurs s’éjouissent à renouveler ces antiquités: – c’est pour eux” [The study of this past delights the curious: several rejoice in reviving those antiquities – it is for them] (250), and it is perhaps here that Rimbaud clears a path for his own creation of free-verse poetry, a poetry that above all else neglects questions of form: “si ce qu’il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme; si c’est informe, il donne de l’informe.” Instead of applying preconceived notions and conventions to his poems, Rimbaud lets the form come to him, and he merely renders the poem in the form in which it appears to him. Having destabilized the reader’s understandings of poetic subjects and objects, senses, meanings, directions, and prosodic forms, Rimbaud acknowledges that none of the tools familiar to his predecessors and contemporaries will be available to him, and that the voyant will necessarily need to find a new means of poetic expression: “Trouver une langue.” Indeed, a large part of Rimbaud’s poetry seems to be constantly in search of a new language, one that can express everything.22 The future of poetry, the extension of his poésie objective, will be as far removed from the individual, subjective experience as 21

252. It is worth noting here that word “informe” can mean both “lack of form” and “ugly,” and thus Rimbaud’s notion of beauty, rather than coming from his own subjective vision, comes to the voyant directly from the object itself. Furthermore, questions of prosodic form are treated equally by the voyant, as this study will show in the coming pages. 22 For more on this aspect of Rimbaud’s poetry, see my “Comment aller de ‘Trouver une langue’ à ‘Plus de mots’? Parcours d’une langue en devenir chez Rimbaud,” 24760 in Langues du XIXe siècle, ed. Graham Falconer, Andrew Oliver, and Dorothy Speirs (Toronto: Centre d’études romantiques Joseph Sablé, 1998).

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possible: “[...] le temps d’un langage universel viendra! [...] Cette langue sera de l’âme pour l’âme, résumant tout, parfums, sons, couleurs, de la pensée accrochant la pensée et tirant” [the time of a universal language will come! [...] This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling] (252). Echoes of Parnassian poetry (“L’âme pour l’âme” instead of l’art pour l’art) and Baudelaire’s synesthesia (“parfums, sons, couleurs”) resound in this description of the future poetic language, which will be pulled in all directions and stretched to its limits.

Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Verse Poetry Numerous critics have shown that time and space are interrupted, or disoriented, in Illuminations.23 While the large majority of studies on notions of time and space among the poems from this grouping suggest that they are innovative for this aspect (among others), this spatio-temporal problematic is evident, albeit to a smaller degree, in Rimbaud’s verse poems. To be sure, his earliest poems very rarely distance themselves from the Parnassian mould they tried to emulate, and the poems sent to Banville in May 1870 offer little exception; “Sensation,” “Soleil et chair,” and “Ophélie” are often considered among the most Parnassian in Rimbaud’s œuvre, for reasons both thematic and formal. The most common interpretation of Rimbaud’s poems of 1870-71 focuses on the details concerning Rimbaud’s initial attraction to and subsequent attack against the majority of Parnassian poets. Steve Murphy explains this superficially seductive reading further: Le Rimbaud du poème antérieur serait un jeune et naïf Parnassian, “épris de la Beauté idéale” de la femme. Après avoir transmis des poèmes nés de cette inspiration orthodoxe à Banville, dans l’espoir de les voir publier dans le Parnasse contemporain, imaginant que leur éloge de la femme serait bien à sa place dans cette vitrine du mouvement parnassien, Rimbaud changerait tout d’un coup de direction. Dépité de la réponse négative de Banville et en même temps envenimé par on ne sait quelles déceptions sentimentales ou sexuelles, Rimbaud cracherait 23

For his work on poems like “À une Raison,” “Parade,” and “Génie,” see Macklin, “The Reinvention of Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Illuminations.”

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non seulement sur la femme, mais aussi sur une poésie qui en fait l’incarnation de la Beauté.24 [The Rimbaud of the earlier poem is a young and naïve Parnassian, “taken with ideal Beauty” of the woman. After having given poems born of this orthodox inspiration to Banville, in the hopes of seeing them published in the Parnasse contemporain, imagining that their praise of the woman would be welcome in this slice of the Parnassian movement, Rimbaud all of a sudden changes direction. Upset by Banville’s negative response and at the same time poisoned by who knows what sentimental or sexual disappointments, Rimbaud spits not only on woman, but also on a poetry that makes her the incarnation of Beauty.]

Although this interpretation is neat, it avoids considering any of the poems on their own merit; indeed, any intertextuality between Parnassian texts and poems such as “Vénus Anadyomène” only serves as the historical context for Rimbaud’s aesthetic as he attempts to carve out a place for himself in the tradition of French poetry.25 Returning to “Sensation,” we see that the very personal experience to which the lyric subject bears witness does in fact display a few hesitations in following the Parnassian approach, a few suggestions of the destabilized subjectivity that will come to characterize the poems of Illuminations. From the onset, the poetic subject takes up the familiar theme of the commemoration of Nature and femininity: Par les soirs bleus d’été, j’irai dans les sentiers, Picoté par les blés, fouler l’herbe menue: Rêveur, j’en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds. Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue. Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien: Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’âme, Et j’irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien, Par la Nature, — heureux comme avec une femme. (6) [In the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths, And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat: Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet. 24

Le premier Rimbaud ou l’apprentissage de la subversion (Paris: Éditions du CNRS; Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1991), 190. 25 For more on “Vénus Anadyomène” as an early example of Rimbaud’s approach to representations of femininity, see my “Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Aesthetics in ‘Vénus Anadyomène’,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 27.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999), 333-45.

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I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak, I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul; And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy, Through the countryside — joyous as if with a woman.]

The overabundance of personal experience in the first quatrain – with the ubiquitous presence of the poetic “je” – underscores the tactile connection to the world around one’s self that bypasses the conscious realms of language in particular and thought in general, as the beginning of the second and final stanza suggests. Furthermore, this expression of sensations in their purest, unmediated states is emphasized by an interesting rime riche between “menue” and “tête nue” that brings even closer together the poetic subject and nature and stresses the former’s nakedness and vulnerability. And yet, this traditional structure is destabilized ever so slightly in the second stanza, as the poem’s focus moves from external to internal stimuli. The sensations in the first half of the poem, literally touching the lyric subject’s feet and head – that is, all over the body, from head to toe – touch the subject in a purely figurative manner in the second. Similarly, the external voyage of the beginning becomes internal, and we have the sense that the journey suggested by the last two lines is imagined rather than truly experienced. Thematically, the absolute nothingness of “rien” that opens this second quatrain sets the tone for other similarly empty extremes: “l’amour infini,” “loin, bien loin,” “comme un bohémien,” “Par la Nature,” and “comme avec une femme.” All of these images – clichés every one – lack the descriptive qualities of their first-stanza counterparts, and the sincere experience recounted in the beginning of this poem is offset by the trite descriptions of the end, built upon notions of time and space that are so vast they are more hollow than awesome. This vastness is perhaps a foreshadowing of the “sense of all-embracing universality”26 that is evident in poems from Illuminations such as “Génie” and “Enfance.” Certainly, the individual mentions of time here in “Sensation” are hardly revolutionary, as both “soirs” and “infini” appear in their most common usages. Nevertheless, the nothingness that, thanks to “rien,” dominates the entire second stanza, comes to bear on the time and 26

Macklin, “Reinvention” 67.

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space contained therein: on the infinite, on distance (“loin, bien loin”), and on Nature. Furthermore, it is important to note that Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens” is not limited to the literal representations of tous les sens as they appear in his poems, but can just as well include the temporal and spatial limits of the poetic form itself. And, whereas the rhyme that stands out in the first stanza brings together the clipped grass on the lyric subject’s feet and his naked vulnerability, the rhyme “rien” / “bohémien” is equally notable in the second stanza. The extremely regular rhythm of the first six lines is interrupted in the seventh when, in order to complete the alexandrine, “bohémien” is pronounced with dieresis – “bo-hé-mi-en” – rather than the syneresis of “rien” in the first line. In addition, the last line begins with the only irregular syllabic structure in the poem, emphasized by both the capital letter in “Nature” and the long dash that follows it. The rhythmic disordering of this poem – coming from the disjunction of the dieresis and syneresis of the “bohémi-en” / “rien” rhyme as well as in the 4-8 alexandrine last line – is, then, another small example of the traditional markers of time and space being altered, or somehow disorganized: an early step in Rimbaud’s poetic project. It is worth noting here that other nineteenth-century French poets demonstrated similar departures from more traditional and conventional poetic forms in their poems. Surprisingly, even Théodore de Banville, often held up as a staunch proponent of traditional French verse due to his important 1872 Petit traité de versification française, took certain liberties regarding classical prosodic forms. As Rosemary Lloyd astutely points out, while he had never intended to do so, Banville unwittingly paved the way for the greater liberties of the 1880s and 1890s: specifically, the kinds of formal disruptions that are evident in Rimbaud’s poem and, later, the advent of free-verse poetry: “La fascination dont fait preuve Banville à l’égard de ce qu’il dénomme ‘les poëmes traditionnels à forme fixe’ peut, elle aussi, être vue comme jouant un rôle dans le développement du vers libre” [Banville’s fascination with what he names “traditional fixed form poems” could be seen as playing a role in the development of free verse].27 Beyond the Parnassian willingness to test the limits of 27

Lloyd 660.

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prosody, however, Rimbaud’s slight movements away from rigid confines of traditional verse forms are more noteworthy for our work here because they are indicative of greater departures that are soon to come. Retaining our focus for the moment on Rimbaud’s early poems, we see that the subject’s difficulty in describing clearly anything beyond the immediate and tactile that so characterizes “Sensation” is evident elsewhere in his early poems. In “Soleil et chair,” the line “Et tout croît, et tout monte!” [And everything grows, and everything rises!] that opens the second stanza is similarly vague, both in the repeated use of the referent-vague pronoun “tout” as well as in the verb choices, “croître” and “monter” being verbs of movement without any specific or even implicit direction in this poem. Much like throughout Illuminations, the presence of the ubiquitous “tout” is proof positive of categories and boundaries at the point of explosion.28 The verb “croître” is echoed, somewhat, at the beginning of the second part of “Soleil et chair,” with the paronomasia between “croire” and “croître” and between “mère” and “mer”: “Je crois en toi! je crois en toi! Divine mère, / Aphrodité marine! — Oh! la route est amère” [I believe in you! I believe in you! Divine mother, / Aphrodite of the sea! — Oh! the way is bitter]. This pair of lines ends in clear spatial terms but the preceding words are, by the suggested polysemy in their pronunciation, less than precise spatial markers, the growth suggested in the “croître” version of “Je croîs en toi” being the kind of movement that is not specific to any particular direction. The slight deviation from an ordered notion of time and space in “Sensation” finds a counterpart in “À la musique,” in which “[…] la place taillée en mesquines pelouses, / Square où tout est correct, les arbres et les fleurs” [the square, cut up into measly plots of grass, / The square where everything is right, trees and flowers] (21) signals the triumph of man over Nature in typical bourgeois fashion. Here, the near captivity of trees and flowers (being “correct”) are just one example of the dominance over Nature, and also over time and space, in the picture-perfect town-square scene mocked by Rimbaud. In this poem, Kristin Ross points out that time “is regulated, divided, calculated to the same extent that space is ‘managed’ in the small

28

Macklin, “Reinvention” 67.

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town.”29 Rather than submit to the confines he depicts in Charleville’s place de la Gare, Rimbaud attacks the bourgeois space it represents, leaving behind him the familiar and the familial, the reassuring space of the small hometown. Clearly, spatial and temporal limits do not sit well with Rimbaud, whom Jacques Plessen describes as “l’homme décentré, qui se place sur la frontière de l’espace du dedans et de l’espace du dehors. Il est l’homme de l’hiatus et non pas celui de la durée vécue” [the decentered man, who places himself on the border between the space of within and the space of beyond. He is a man of hiatus and not one of lived duration].30 In “Accroupissements,” the last poem inserted in the poet’s Lettre du voyant of 15 May 1871, the staid and polite universe of bourgeois nineteenth-century Charleville is once again under attack, this time for the torrid existence depicted therein: “C’est une vision saisissante de l’existence que le voyant veut transformer, mais qu’il doit décrire avant de la transformer” [It is a striking vision of the existence that the seer wants to transform, but that he must describe before transforming it].31 In another context, this critique of being sedentary is a shot across the bow of Parnassian poetry, with its valorization of immobility: “On voit que tout ce qui est sédentaire, immobile, accroupi, est chargé d’une valeur péjorative [...]” [We see that all that is sedentary, immobile, squatting down, is charged with a pejorative significance].32 “Accroupissements,” which Rimbaud called “un chant pieux” [a pious song] (254), is mostly an affront to le Parnasse for its subject matter, in which idealized Nature is juxtaposed with the scatological; the appearance of the Venus in the last verse recalls “Vénus Anadyomène,” with the rime riche of its last tercet: Les reins portent deux mots gravés: Clara Venus; — Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus. (22) 29

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 78. 30 Plessen 282. 31 Pierre Brunel, ed., Rimbaud. Œuvres complètes, by Arthur Rimbaud (Paris: Librairie générale française / Le Livre de poche “La Pochothèque,” 1999), 249n1. 32 Lapeyre 70. Lapeyre does make an exception for “repos”: rest chosen actively, differing thus from the sloth railed against in “Accroupissements”; see her pages 7374. She concludes similarly about “Les assis,” stating: “Tout ce qui est sédentaire fait horreur à Rimbaud” [All that is sedentary is horrific to Rimbaud] (69).

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[The buttocks bear two engraved words: Clara Venus; — And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.]

Just as scandalous, the graphic description of squattings and the other indecorous gastro-intestinal details of “Accroupissements” stand in stark contrast to the idyllic setting of the last stanza. The return of the verb “s’accroupir” [to bend down] implies a repeated theme even though the “accroupissement” was biological in the poem’s first movement (“il s’est accroupi”) [he squatted] and of a decidedly different “natural” order in the last one (“Une ombre avec détails s’accroupit”) [A shadow with details crouches]. In addition to undermining the conventional depiction of the idyllic, Rimbaud sets this poem up as a series of sketches and still lifes, without clear connection between them. Whatever development of the character of Milotus the reader might expect is undermined in this lack of continuity, and instead we are left to try to find the threads that link this poem’s movements. Even visually, the poem is divided into three parts: the two rows of dotted lines (one separating lines 15 and 16, the other between lines 30 and 3133) divide the poem into three groups which, according to Schaeffer, “se proposent comme trois situations du personnage dont il s’agira de déterminer les coordonnées spatiotemporelles” [are proposed as three situations for the character of whom it will be necessary to determine the spatio-temporal coordinates].34 The existence of “le frère Milotus” is chopped up and spread out across three portraits; this character, destabilized by his dispersion through the temporal realm, marks a clear departure from the stability of characters of Parnassian poetry, subjects and objects alike.

33

For a reproduction of the manuscript of this poem see Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 4 vols., ed. Steve Murphy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999-), 4:265-66. 34 “Poèmes de la révolte et de la dérision,” in Études sur les Poésies de Rimbaud, ed. M. Eigeldinger (Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière, 1979), 126.

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Derniers vers: Pushing Limits, Stretching Out “The Human Imagination... appear’d to Me... throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be Establish’d”35

More dramatically than in his earlier verse poems, which only hint at destabilization, the notions of time and space start coming apart In Rimbaud’s verse poetry of 1872 – called alternatively “Derniers vers” or “Vers nouveaux.” In a discussion establishing a clear temporal link between literature and the world it represents, Paul Ricœur explains: “Le monde déployé par toute œuvre narrative est toujours un monde temporel. […] le temps devient temps humain dans la mesure où il est articulé de manière narrative; en retour le récit est significatif dans la mesure où il dessine les traits de l’expérience temporelle” [The world displayed in all narrative work is always a temporal world. [....] time becomes human time in the sense that it is articulated in a narrative manner; in return, the story is significant in the sense that it sketches the traits of temporal experience].36 Despite its lack of narrative structures, the poetic realm still possesses the marks of the temporal world – or of some temporal world. As the conventional titles for Rimbaud’s 1872 verse poems suggest, the departures from conventional notions of time – and of space – are evident not only within the semantic function of language but also in stylistic, rhetorical and poetic functions. In “Qu’est-ce pour nous, mon cœur…” (71), for example, the fluid rhythm of the alexandrine is broken up; the abundance of punctuation37 in the second and third stanzas, and of exclamation marks in particular, creates a choppy movement through the poem: Et toute vengeance? Rien!… — Mais si, tout encor, Nous la voulons! Industriels, princes, sénats, Périssez! puissance, justice, histoire, à bas! Ça nous est dû. Le sang! le sang! la flamme d’or!

35

William Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgment” [1818], The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 606. 36 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit. Vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983), 17. Many thanks to Michel Murat for discussing Ricœur and time with me. 37 See Gerald Macklin, “Perspectives on the Role of Punctuation in Rimbaud’s Illuminations,” Journal of European Studies 20.1 (March 1990), 59-72.

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Tout à la guerre, à la vengeance, à la terreur, Mon Esprit! Tournons dans la Morsure: Ah! passez, Républiques de ce monde! Des empereurs, Dés régiments, des colons, des peuples, assez! [And all vengeance? Nothing!.. — But yes, still, We want it! Industrialists, princes, senates, Perish! power, justice, history, down with you! That is our due. Blood! blood! golden flame! All to war, to vengeance and to terror, My Spirit! Let us turn about in the Biting Jaws: Ah! vanish, Republics of this world! Of Emperors, Regiments, colonists, peoples, enough!]

The vortices suggested in the “tourbillons de feu furieux” [whirlwinds of furious fire]38 of the next line whip through this poem and annihilate the spatial demarcations – that is, geographic boundaries – of the fifth stanza: Europe, Asie, Amérique, disparaissez. Notre marche vengeresse a tout occupé, Cités et campagnes! — Nous serons écrasés! Les volcans sauteront! et l’océan frappé… [Europe, Asia, America, disappear. Our avenging march has occupied every place, City and country! — We will be overcome! Volcanoes will explode! and the ocean struck…]

Kristin Ross sees in this passage and others like it “a kind of charting of social movement in geographic terms”; 39 the current study charts more along the axes of the lyric, in terms of the external spaces that surround it and the internal ones that help define it. The other-worldly winds change again, moving as they did in “Sensation” from the outside world to the lyric subject’s internal struggles, the pressure behind the “tourbillons” and the “volcans” echoed in the verb “frémir” in the poem’s last lines:

38

For more on the presence of vortices and “tourbillons” in Rimbaud’s poetry, see Minahen, Vortex/t: The Poetics of Turbulence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), particularly 115-28. 39 Ross 76.

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Ô malheur! je me sens frémir, la vieille terre, Sur moi de plus en plus à vous! la terre fond, Ce n’est rien! j’y suis! j’y suis toujours. [Woe! woe! I feel myself tremble, the old earth, On me, more and more yours! the earth melts, It is nothing! I am here! I am still here.]

Without a traditional spatial and temporal framework, Rimbaud’s subject attempts to reassert his self three times in the last line, a ninesyllable line coming after the end of six alexandrine quatrains. First, there is the negation of the melting earth, in “Ce n’est rien.” Next comes the most basic expression of existence, “je suis,” with the added spatial preposition “y,” a direct response to the lack of spatial markers that the loss of earth creates. Lastly, this sentence is repeated and built upon, adding the temporal “toujours” to complete this declaration of self amidst the quaking axes of time and space. Already offset from the lines that precede it by a blank space and by the shock of its syllabic difference, this line clearly shows the Rimbaldian subject’s arrival at a sense of self built on new notions of time and space, beyond the traditional space of the quatrain and the traditional time of the twelve-beat alexandrine.40 Another poem from 1872 in which time and space are problematic is entitled “Bannières de mai” in almost all editions of Rimbaud’s work but bearing the title “Patience” in a later version – the version that should be taken to be the posterior, definitive one – of which the manuscript was only recently shared from an important private collection.41 Space is described in chaotic terms, evident in the first stanza’s use of the verbs “voltiger” [to fly about] and “s’enchevêtrer” [to become entangled]. The poetic subject takes off, lets go, and describes eternity in “L’azur et l’onde communient” [Azure and Wave 40

For more on this last line of “Qu’est-ce pour nous […],” see Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. Murphy 1:868-72. 41 Steve Murphy explains why “Patience” should be considered to be the last version of the poem; see his edition of Rimbaud’s Œuvres complètes 4:746-51. For information on the unveiling of this manuscript, see his “Trois manuscrits de Rimbaud,” Histoires littéraires 17 (2004), 34-57, especially 36-37 and 40-41; and Emmanuelle Toulet, ed. Livres du Cabinet de Pierre Berès (Chantilly: Musée Condée, 2003).

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commune] echoing the famous formulation from “L’Éternité,” the third poem in this section: “C’est la mer allée / Avec le soleil” [It is the sea gone off / With the sun] (79). “Patience” suggests an earlier state, before the loss of conventional time and space markers that the melting of the earth and the lyric subject’s new understanding of time and space in “Qu’est-ce pour nous, mon cœur…”. After all, in this poem – with the presence of summer and all seasons in the second and third stanzas, and May in the title – concrete references to measurements of time from nature (seasons) and science (the month of May) play a crucial role. But it is in the very title that we see the traditional tension between man and the passing of time: to be patient is to withstand the duration of something, the temporal aspect evident in the synonym to endure. Benoît de Cornulier explains: La patience est normalement une vertu enseignée, qu’il s’agisse de savoir attendre ce qu’on ne peut ou doit pas hâter, ou même, avec une connotation latine (pati = subir) et religieuse, de savoir accepter les souffrances de cette vie d’ici-bas en attendant le bonheur promis d’une vie future […]42 [Patience is normally a learned virtue, be it for learning to wait that which one shouldn’t rush, or even, with a connotation both Latin [pati = to suffer] and religious, learning to accept suffering of this life while waiting for the happiness promised in a future life.]

According to Ricœur, the duration of the soul across time – the distentio animi – occupies a central place in the writings of Augustine, who alone “ose admettre qu’on puisse parler d’espace de temps – un jour, une heure – sans référence cosmologique. La notion de distentio animi servira précisément de substitut à ce support cosmologique de l’espace de temps” [dares admit that one can speak of an amount of time – a day, an hour – without cosmological reference. The notion of distentio animi will serve precisely as a substitute to this cosmological framework of an amount of time].43 On the other hand, it is precisely 42

Benoît de Cornulier, “La ‘Chanson de la plus haute Tour’ entre poésie littéraire et chant traditionnel,” in Rimbaud: Textes et contextes d’une révolution poétique, Parade sauvage colloque 4 (13-15 septembre 2002) (Charleville-Mézières: MuséeBibliothèque Arthur Rimbaud, 2004), 160. 43 Ricœur 32n1. Ricœur discusses this relation in Augustine’s writings between motus (movement) and mora (duration).

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the impatience with respect to time that characterizes many of the most famous poems, including “Cueillez dés aujourd’huy les roses de la vie” [Gather today the roses of life]; “O temps, suspends ton vol” [Oh time, suspend your flight], and others. The act of “patienter,” then, is one of the original time trials: if the clock never stops reminding us the extent to which tempus fugit, it is the precise opposite of carpe diem that is required to master the relationship between human existence and time. And what of the echoes of the verb “faire” in the title “Fêtes de la patience?” Here this challenge is addressed to us through paronomasia, placing it on the same level as the Ronsardian and Lamartinian imperatives quoted just above.44 Patience is therefore an attitude of the subject in time vis-à-vis the unavoidable, a manner of distancing itself temporally and emotionally from the flow of time and, by extension, from our own inevitable death, approaching with each tick of the clock. On this point, let us not forget that, as the lyric subject at the end of Une saison en enfer makes clear, “il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps” [I shall be free to possess truth in one body and soul] because, at dawn, he will be armed “d’une ardente patience” [with an ardent patience] (117). This approach to the flow of time, one of the manifestations of the tension that extends throughout Rimbaud’s work between the subject and the spatio-temporal axes upon which his very existence is constructed, is part of the poetic project of reaching the unknown (here, in time and in space). The temporal unknown is found in the notion of distentio animi, which, according to Ricœur, slips through the neatly segmented and regimented measurements of time: Puisque je mesure le mouvement d’un corps par le temps et non l’inverse, puisqu’on ne peut mesurer un temps long que par un temps court, et puisque nul mouvement physique n’offre une mesure fixe de comparaison, le mouvement des astres étant supposé variable, il reste que l’extension du temps soit une distension de l’âme.45

44

This word play between “fête” and “faites” is limited neither to the nineteenth century nor to poetry; the official slogan for the 2004 edition of France’s national “Fête de la musique” was written: “Faites de la musique.” 45 Ricœur 33-34.

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[Since I measure the movement of a body through time and not the inverse, since we can only measure a long time by a short time, and since no physical movement offers a fixed measure of comparison, supposing the movement of the stars to be variable, it remains that the extension of time is a distension of the soul.]

For his part, Henri Bergson establishes a clear distinction between subjective time, resulting in a duration, and objective time, the one that can be calculated, measured, and divided: “[...] mais le temps que l’astronome introduit dans ses formules, le temps que nos horloges introduit en parcelles égales, ce temps-là, dira-t-on, est autre chose; c’est une grandeur mesurable, et par conséquent homogène” [but the time that the astronomer introduces in formulas, the time that our clocks presents in equal parts, this time, we shall say, is another thing; it is a grandeur that is measurable, and by consequent homogeneous].46 As Bergson explains, in a duration the limits between past and present disappear: “La durée toute pure est la forme que prend la succession de nos états de conscience quand notre moi se laisse vivre, quand il s’abstient d’établir une séparation entre l’état présent et les états antérieurs” [Pure duration is the form taken by the succession of our states of consciousness when our self lets itself live, when it ceases to establish a separation between the present state and past states].47 Or, as he states in his famous formulation from Matière et mémoire: Mais le présent réel, concret, vécu, celui dont je parle quand je parle de ma perception présente, celui-là occupe nécessairement une durée. Où est donc située cette durée? Est-ce en deçà, est-ce au delà du point mathématique que je détermine idéalement quand je pense à l’instant présent? Il est trop évident qu’elle est en deçà et au delà tout à la fois, et que ce que j’appelle “mon présent” empiète tout à la fois sur mon passé et sur mon avenir. […] Il faut donc que l’état psychologique que j’appelle “mon présent” soit tout à la fois une perception du passé immédiat et une détermination de l’avenir immédiat.48 [But the present that is real, concrete, lived, the one of which I speak when I speak of my present perception, that one necessarily occupies a direction. Where then is this duration situated? Is it within, or beyond, the mathematical point that I ideally determine when I think of the present moment? It is clearly evident that it is 46

72. In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1-157), Bergson takes on the Aristotelian notion of time as a measure of space, of time as a unit of measure of movement. 47 Bergson 67. 48 Bergson 280; emphasis added.

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within and beyond at the same time, and that what I call “my present” has a foot simultaneously in my past and my future. […] It is thus necessary that the psychological state that I call “my present” be, at once, both a perception of an immediate past and a determination of an immediate future.]

This aspect of a present that surpasses its limits, in a sense, recalls eternity, both the poem by Rimbaud and the Augustinian sense of the term, where “nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present. But no temporal process is wholly simultaneous.”49 It should also be noted that Rimbaud is certainly not the first to seek poetic manifestations of subjective time in reacting to the omnipresence of objective time, represented by the omnipresent clocks in the nineteenth century, as the eponymous poem by Baudelaire demonstrates: “Horloge! dieu sinistre, effrayant, impassible, / Dont le doigt nous menace et nous dit: ‘Souviens-toi!’” [Clock! sinister god, frightful, impassible, / Whose finger menaces us and says: “Remember!”]. 50 Baudelaire revisits this theme in his prose poem “La chambre double,” which ends: “Oui! Le Temps règne; il a repris sa brutale dictature. Et il me pousse, comme si j’étais un bœuf, avec son double aiguillon. — ‘Et hue donc! Bourrique! Sue donc, esclave! Vis donc, damné!’” [Yes! Time rules; it has restarted its brutal dictatorship. And it pushes me, as if I were an ox, with its two sharp points. — “Giddy up! Donkey! Sweat, you slave! Live, you damned one!”].51 Since duration 49

Confessions book XI, chapter 11. This is taken up again in book XI, chapter XX, where there is only present: present of past things, of present things and of future things. For more on this Augustinian dialectic see the discussion by Ricœur 27-29. 50 Baudelaire 1:81. 51 Baudelaire 1:282. Of course, modernity’s advancements in measurements and portability, which put a clock on every tabletop and a watch on every wrist, only exacerbate the inability to come to grips with time’s fleeting nature. Some hundred years after Rimbaud’s era, other verses captured a similar reaction to time: If I could, I’d slow the whole world down I’d bring it to its knees I’d stop it spinning round But as it is, I’m climbing up an endless wall No time at all No time this time No time at all No time this time. (The Police, “No Time This Time,” Reggatta de Blanc [A&M Records, 1979]).

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implies, as we have just seen, the juxtaposition of the past in the present and of the present in the future, it is necessarily opposed to the notion of the traditional, and linear, flowing of time, and it is aligned with the déréglé notion of time in Rimbaud’s poetry. This will be even further evident in the perturbed time and space in the poems in Illuminations and even in Une saison en enfer, where time plays a central role even in the very title (a season, a time determined by nature [like a harvest] and not by any calendar or clock); as Roger Little has demonstrated with respect to Illuminations, “[Rimbaud] purposely shuffl[es] the cards so as to create an effect which makes the past, the whole past, represented by a variety of datable allusions, participate in the present of the poem.”52 Patience in this poem rejects, in a certain way, what might be called the classical approach to time; as a result we find “un présent qui se situe dans une durée comme suspendue et qui traduit une expérience du locuteur, contemporaine de l’acte de l’écriture” [a present situated in a duration as suspended and which translates a speaker’s experience, contemporary with the act of writing].53 This refusal is equally present in the versification of the poem, in rupture with traditional prosodic fluidity: the poem’s very structure – a dizain followed by two octaves – and the lack of external rhymes. At the same time, Rimbaud establishes a tension between this lack of fluidity and an unmistakable rhythm found in the repetition in the first three verses of words beginning with the phoneme “m”: “meurt,” “maladif,” “mais.” This alliteration is an effect of language that surpasses the moment of any single word, linking these words; as a result the end (the death) of a word is tied to the other words that are linked to it, and this linguistic patience is another means of opposing the passing of time and the death that it represents.54 Furthermore, it is worth noting that the two last verses of the first strophe represent a poetic prolon52

Rimbaud, Illuminations 46; see in particular his excellent chapter 4: “Space and Time,” 44-57. 53 Marc Eigeldinger, “Bannières de mai,” Le point vélique: Études sur Arthur Rimbaud et Germain Nouveau. Université de Neuchâtel, Actes du colloque des 27 et 28 mai 1983 (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1986), 68. 54 For more on this, see Nicolas Ruwet’s article, so kindly brought to my attention by Philippe Rocher. Jean-Pierre Chambon’s study considers parallelisms in “l,” as well as the “spirituelles”/ “groseilles” rhyme at the beginning of this poem (see bibliography for complete information).

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gation – as much spatial (on the page) as temporal (in syllables) – which has as its parallel a temporal prolongation of the lyric subject in its “patience.”55 However, if this poem deals with patience as a new approach to the passing of time, what could be meant of the beginning of the second stanza, of the verse “Qu’on patiente et qu’on s’ennuie” [To be patient and to be bored] in which the lyric subject clearly indicates that “patienter” is “trop simple”? The lyric subject seems to shrug away passive actions like “se patienter” and “s’ennuyer”: banal emotions connected to traditional measures of time. The desire here is for the “été dramatique” and all the seasons to wear him out; that is, for the seasons to go beyond the facile and comfortable boundaries that have been set for them. Giving himself over to Nature, the Rimbaldian subject is once again vulnerable. But while the vulnerability in “Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue” from “Sensation” was expressed in terms of a future state, “Patience” suspends time in the new-found eternal present that surpasses our traditional understanding of past, present, and future, and which is found in many of Rimbaud’s poems from 1872 on. This reading is supported in the title, or the subtitle, depending on how the manuscript from the Pierre Berès collection is read. Whether it refers to a tradition of titles going back to antiquity (according to Benoît de Cornulier) or a more or less direct reference to a more or less real summer (according to Steve Murphy), it is impossible to ignore the present of “D’un été,” even underlined, on the Berès manuscript.56 The reading does not depend on the interpretation of the manuscript, but rather on the words themselves: here it is not about a typical or daily patience, the kind of patience that would be invoked by a more traditional title, with or without definite article, but rather the temporal expanse that is framed by it. Not the patience necessary to wait an entire afternoon, or even until next week, but the patience of a summer, of an entire season. As has already been mentioned, it is important to remember that this block of time represents a duration that is not defined by a clock’s movements, since these are precisely the moments that elude any scientific measurements (from the French word, réglage, we see that opposing time 55

Another interesting detail, not treated here, is the alphabetic progression of the first four words: “Aux,” “branches,” “claires,” “des.” 56 On this point, see Murphy, “Trois manuscrits de Rimbaud,” in particular 40-41.

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would be moments that are déréglementés) that the Rimbaldian lyric subject searches for in its patience. The resignation that critics often see in the last stanza, when the lyric subject gives himself to Nature, is not as it appears: the verb that opens this stanza underscores the willingness to participate in this extra-temporal experience: “Je veux bien que les saisons m’usent” [I am willing that the seasons wear me out). This is even stronger because the lyric subject’s adopted position is found at the beginning of the last strophe, while the grammatical subjects of the first phrases of the two first stanzas appear only in each stanza’s second verse: (“un maladif hallali” or “c’est” from “c’est trop simple”); in addition, there is a strong presence of the lyric “je” starting with the beginning of this last strophe. Or, as Bernard Meyer put it so well: “L’offrande de soi comme victime représente l’attitude dynamique opposée à l’attente ennuyée. Se refusant à patienter, le poète souhaite devenir, au sens étymologique du terme, un patient, il veut changer, pourrait-on dire, une passivité passive en passivité active” [The offering of self as victim represents the dynamic attitude, as opposed to bored waiting. Refusing to wait patiently, the poet hopes to become, in the etymological sense of the word, a patient; he wants to change, it could be said, a passive passivity into an active passivity].57 In this consideration of patience as a response to the flowing of time and to the scientific and traditional divisions and measurements of time, there is the unmistakable echo of the word “science” in “patience.” As Jacques Plessen remarks: Dans ce comportement, qui traduit un profond déchirement, nous pouvons déceler, à côté de tendances psychologiques propres à Rimbaud, un reflet de son temps. Homme des frontières, Rimbaud l’est avec tous ses contemporains. La Commune est la plus évidente manifestation de ces fissures qui menaçaient le vieil édifice social. Mais la science, elle aussi, avait ouvert des brèches béantes dans la traditionnelle vision du monde. Sous le Second Empire, corps social et idéologie se sont décentrés, malgré les tentatives de Napoléon III et de la classe qu’il incarnait pour retarder le moment de la dangereuse “décentration.”58

57

Bernard Meyer, Sur les Derniers vers: Douze lectures de Rimbaud (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 97. 58 Plessen 283.

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[In this behavior, which translates a profound tearing apart, we can detect, next to the psychological tendencies unique to Rimbaud, a reflection of his time. Rimbaud is a man of borders like all his contemporaries. The Commune is the most evident manifestation of the fissures that menaced the old social edifice. But science also opened gaping holes in the traditional vision of the world. Under the Second Empire, social body and ideology were decentered, despite the attempts of Napoleon III and of the class that he embodied to delay the movement of the dangerous “decentering.”]

Without going so far as to say that Rimbaud presents an anti-scientific treatise in this poem, it does seem nevertheless interesting that the refusal of scientific absolutes of time here is almost precisely summed up – just one vowel away – in the title itself: “pas science.” This extrapolation might seem somewhat forced – Meyer calls it a “mauvais jeu de mot” [bad play on words]59 – but if Alexandre Amprimoz reads in “Mais des chansons spirituelles” a transposition of the words “Mai des champs son spirituel,” this being example of what he calls “la fragmentation, pour ne pas dire ‘la dissolution du moi’ si fondamentale chez Rimbaud” [the fragmentation, if not the “dissolution of the self” so fundamental in Rimbaud]60, it seems less of a stretch to hear the echoes suggested here in the title “Patience.” Furthermore, these same homonyms are in the lines “Science avec patience, / Le supplice est sûr” [Science with patience, / The torture is certain] from “L’Éternité” in this same series of poems from 1872.61 Closing these somewhat parenthetical remarks on science, let us say simply that the science in “Patience” represents the traditional constraints of time and the means to measure and to explain the passing of time: in other words, the obstacle that an attitude of patience opposes. In this regard, there is a somewhat surprising echo in lines from Vigny’s “La maison du berger”: La distance et le temps sont vaincus. La science Trace autour de la terre un chemin triste et droit. Le monde est rétréci par notre expérience Et l’équateur n’est plus qu’un anneau trop étroit. Plus de hasard. Chacun glissera sur sa ligne 59

Meyer 162n35. Alexandre L. Amprimoz, “L’instant du martyre: La première strophe de ‘Bannières de mai’,” Studia Neophilologica 57 (1985), 89. 61 Rimbaud 79, then reprinted “Science et patience” in “Délires II. Alchimie du verbe” in Une saison en enfer (110). 60

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Immobile au seul rang que le départ assigne, Plongé dans un calcul silencieux et froid.62 [Distance and time are conquered. Science Traces around the globe a sad and straight path. The World is shrunken by our experience And the equator is nothing more than a ring too tight. No more chance. Each of us will glide on our line, Immobile on the only level that departure assigns, Plunged into a silent and cold calculation.]

This is not to suggest that “Patience” is inspired directly by “La maison du berger”; however, the refusal of scientific constraints along axes of time and space – “vaincus” in Vigny’s poem, déréglementés in Rimbaud’s – in these verses from Vigny are echoed, to a certain degree, in the refusal of the flowing of time: Rimbaldian patience. But since Rimbaud’s project of a “dérèglement de tous les sens” permits us to consider simultaneously all the meanings (sens) of words, another entry in the definition of the word “patience” proves to be useful to the current reading of this poem: Genre de plantes de la famille des polygonées [sic], genre rumex / Plante dont l’espèce commune, dite aussi parelle, croît dans les terres incultes et a des feuilles semblables à celles de l’oseille, rumex patentia. Rabelais, Pantagruel IV, Prol. “Attendez encore un peu avec demi once de patience.”63 [Genus of plant of the family of polygonaceae, genus rumex / Plant of which the common species, also called parelle, grows in wastelands and has leaves similar to those of the sorrel plant, rumex patentia. Rabelais, Pantagruel IV, Prol. “Wait just a little longer with a half ounce of patience.”]

Without insisting too heavily on any particular characteristics of this plant – a phanerogamous plant, like buckwheat and sorrel – it is worth remembering Rimbaud’s own knowledge of the plant world, from the beginning of the third part of “Ce qu’on dit au Poète à propos de fleurs”: 62

Alfred de Vigny, Œuvres complètes, ed. François Germain and André Jarry, vol. 1, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 122. 63 Littré, s.v. “Patience”; the present-day Petit Robert defines it as follows: “Nom courant du rumex, plante (Polygonacées), appelée aussi oseille épinard, parelle” [Common name of rumex, plant [Polygonaceae], also called spinach sorrel, parelle] (s.v. “Patience”).

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Ô blanc Chasseur, qui cours sans bas À travers le Pâtis panique, Ne peux-tu pas, ne dois-tu pas Connaître un peu ta botanique? (57) [O white Hunter, who run without stockings Through the panic Pastures, Can’t you, ought you not Know your botany a little?]

In “Patience,” Rimbaud makes full use of prosopopoeia, giving life to this plant through its role as the lyric subject, and it’s precisely in its intertext with Ronsard’s poetry evoked earlier that Rimbaldian patience blossoms. If we are to consider this poem as representative of the attitude opposing the carpe diem of “Cueillez dés aujourd’huy les roses de la vie […],” we can easily envision the patience – the plant – as the antithesis of the Ronsardian rose. This latter flora represents beauty, fragility, and the ephemeral, while the patience is above all known for its medicinal properties – laxative, depurative, tonic, strengthening – and for its flowers, which enjoy a long season, visible from May (from whence perhaps comes the earlier title “Bannières de mai”) to September. It is also worth nothing that the patience that dominates this poem also opposes the plants called “impatiente” in French, “impatiens” in English (yet also called Patience Plant), which Littré defines as follows: “Terme de botanique. Plantes impatientes, plantes dont les fruits mûrs s’ouvrent au moindre attouchement. […] Impatiente, nom d’un genre de balsaminées, dont fait partie la balsamine des jardins, impatiens balsamina” [Term of botany. Impatiens plants, plants whose mature fruits open to the slightest touch. […] Impatiens, name of a genus of balsamines, which includes the garden balsamine, impatiens balsamina].64 It is precisely as a response to Ronsard’s rose that the patience is most interesting to consider. In “Cueillez dés aujourd’huy les roses de la vie,” the reader witnesses an external conversation, replaced in “Patience” by an internal monologue. This internal aspect of the patience-plant recalls Richard’s discussion of flora in Rimbaud’s work: “La fleur alors s’intériorise, elle devient regard. […] Dans la fleur ce n’est plus seulement une 64

Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, s.v. “Impatiens.”

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vigueur qui s’actualise: c’est une existence qui se creuse, tout un monde intérieur qui s’exprime et qui se recueille” [The flower thus turns inward, becomes gaze. […] In the flower it is not only a vigor that is actualized; it is an existence that digs deep, an entire interior world that is expressed and that is collected].65 Instead of being the rose, impassive sign and cliché of beauty and Nature and reflects human emotions, the patience is complicated and relatively unknown, potential source of emotions and desires, much like Rimbaud’s lyric subject. Ronsard’s flower is subjected to the passing of time, whereas Rimbaud’s plant opposes it actively; or, to borrow Meyer’s formulation, with an active passivity. The action undertaken by the patience is so easily summarized – “Je sors!” [I go out!] – but this simple act is a one of an enormous courage since it brings with it the certain death of the plant. Risking its own life, the plant opens up to the Sun, to Nature and to the beauty of harmony or of communion in Nature. Instead of seeing, like Meyer and many others, that “[…] le poète, par une décision délibérée, choisit de mourir en participant à la vie cosmique” [the poet, by a deliberate decision, chooses to die in participating in cosmic life]66 the present reading of “Patience” suggests that it is the plant that deliberately takes this decision and accepts to die in this manner. This decision is also notable for its position in the poem. The first eight verses of the first stanza are characterized by a regular rhythm: an octosyllabic octave, a nice, neat, eight-by-eight square. With the plant, the moment to blossom comes when everything is ready: “Le ciel est joli comme un ange. / Azur et Onde communient” [The sky is pretty as an angel / Azure and Wave commune]. Here then is the decisive moment, the moment of passing from “passivité passive” to “passivité active,” and this key moment for the subject, for this lyric patience, is situated precisely in what we have already identified as the spatio-temporal prolongation of the first stanza, in the two verses that create a rupture with the regular prosodic order. From the point of view of the plant, the patience takes the risk of opening itself up to the sun, since it is only in this act – open to the world, to Nature – that it will live, even if there are risks: “Je sors! Si un rayon me blesse / Je succomberai sur la mousse” [I go out! If a ray of light wounds me / I 65 66

Jean-Pierre Richard, Poésie et profondeur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955), 203. Meyer 98.

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will expire on the moss]. The danger for this subject-plant is that the sun of this poem is not the spring sun that softly awakens the flora, but the hot summer sun – and here again is the title, “Patience d’un été” – which wounds as much as it nourishes. For the plant, opening itself and growing also means exposing itself and embracing eventual death. Too bad, decides the patience: “[...] Fi de ces peines. / Je veux que l’été dramatique / Me lie à son char de fortune” [Fie on these cares. / I want dramatic summer / To bind me to its chariot of fortune]. In this desire to be tied to “un char de fortune” – would this sun-kissed chariot be one of the “calèches sur les routes du ciel” [carriages on roads in the sky] from Une saison en enfer? – there is the mythical ascension of Icarus, in which the sky offers liberty and happiness and is simultaneously a source of danger. Here, from the point of view of the Rimbaldian plant, this same sun is source of life and of death, but the plant-subject no longer is afraid: “Que par toi beaucoup, O Nature, / — Ah moins nul et moins seul! je meure” [Let me, O Nature, mostly through you / — Ah less worthless and les alone! I die]. The patience gives itself totally over to Nature, for the necessities that appear as parallels in verses 21 and 22: hunger, satisfied by photosynthesis, is echoed in the imperative “nourris,” as much as thirst, in “abreuve.” The verse “C’est rire aux parents qu’au soleil” [To laugh at the sun is to laugh at one’s parents] offers a blanket rejection of all forms of authority under the sun, so to speak, be it from the social or the natural. In the present reading it is the authority of Nature – in other words the sun, but also rain – which dominates; in this way the plant rejects all forms of external authority, anything that is not Nature. Keeping in mind the refusal of authority on the part of the temporal patience, let us consider the citation from Marceline DesbordesValmore on the back of the manuscript of “Patience”: the verse “Prends-y garde, O ma vie absente!” [Watch out, oh my absent life!],67 second-to-last line from a poem entitled “C’est moi” [It is I], published for the first time in 1825: 67

On this verse, see Lucien Chovet, “Un faux Rimbaud encore non identifié ou Marceline Desbordes-Valmore plagiaire par anticipation de Rimbaud,” Histoires littéraires 5 (2001), 61-66; and Olivier Bivort, “Les ‘Vies absentes’ de Rimbaud et de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 101.4 (JulyAugust 2001), 1269-73.

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Si ta marche attristée S’égare au fond d’un bois, Dans la feuille agitée Reconnais-tu ma voix? Et dans la fontaine argentée, Crois-tu me voir quand tu te vois? Qu’une rose s’effeuille, En roulant sur tes pas, Si ta pitié la cueille, Dis! ne me plains-tu pas? Et de ton sein, qui la recueille, Mon nom s’exhale-t-il tout bas? Qu’un léger bruit t’éveille, T’annonce-t-il mes vœux? Et si la jeune abeille Passe devant tes yeux, N’entends-tu rien à ton oreille? N’entends-tu pas ce que je veux? La feuille frémissante, L’eau qui parle en courant, La rose languissante, Qui te cherche en mourant; Prends-y garde, ô ma vie absente! C’est moi qui t’appelle en pleurant.68 [If your saddened walk Gets lost deep in a woods, In the agitated leaves Will you recognize my voice? And in the silvery fountain, Do you believe you see me when you see yourself? Should a rose lose its petals, Rolling under your steps, If your pity gathers it, Say! Will you not pity me? And from your breast, which takes it in, Is my name breathed out softly?

68

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Les œuvres complètes de Marceline DesbordesValmore, 2 vols., ed. Marc Bertrand (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1973), 1:111-12.

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Should a soft sound awaken you, Will it tell you my wishes? And if the young bee Passes before your eyes, Do you not hear anything in your ear? Do you not hear what I want? The shivering leaf, The water who speaks to you while flowing, The languishing rose, Who looks for you while dying; Watch out, oh my absent life! It is I who call you while crying.]

Since this quote is assuredly in Rimbaud’s hand – the first letter of the verse has the same shape as that of the title word “Patience,” and the same can be said for the “v” in “vie” matching the one, in “Patience,” in “vignes” – it is worth considering why Rimbaud copied down this verse. The placement on the sheet of paper indicates that it is neither a title, since the words begin at the extreme left-hand side of the page, nor the beginning of a new train of thought. Despite all that has been said about Rimbaud’s lists of words and phrases,69 if this verse from Desbordes-Valmore were to be at the top of a new list (of verses inspired or inspiring), Rimbaud would have surely written all the way at the top of the page (especially if he felt the constraints of a lack of paper, as has often been suggested); however, this verse is written after a significant amount of blank space (certainly enough to write more words). Since few have commented on the influence of this Desbordes-Valmore verse on “Patience,”70 the present study proposes a hypothesis that explains this verse by both its position on the page and the strong links between the two concerned poems: Rimbaud deliberately wrote this verse on the back of the page upon which he 69

Among these, a list of Spanish words incited an “enquête”; see my “Réponse à une enquête: ‘L’homme à la grammaire espagnole,’” Histoires littéraires 22 (April-June 2005), 64-65. 70 Neither of the two commentators of the source of the citation followed up on this aspect, as Bivort writes: “Rapprochement fortuit, peut-être, mais qui s’impose: Rimbaud doit à Marceline autre chose que des thèmes ou des idées, notre emprunt mis à part. Elle ne semble pas en effet avoir laissé de traces significatives dans son œuvre” [Fortuitous connection, perhaps, but an important one: Rimbaud owes DesbordesValmore something other than themes or ideas, this borrowing notwithstanding. She does not seem to have left any significant traces in his work] (Bivort 1272).

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intended to write a poem in response. Accepting this link between recto and verso, it is interesting to consider the relationship between the two poems: a few similarities, even on the level of the poems’ structures. In “C’est moi,” each strophe is a hexasyllabic quatrain followed by a refrain of an octosyllabic couplet.71 In addition, an analog structure is evident in “Patience,” bearing witness to an interruption before the last verses of each strophe: before the prosodic prolongation of the last two verses of the dizain, after the dash of the second strophe and beginning with the conjunction “Mais” of the second-to-last verse of the poem. The two titles suggest two different stances of a lyric subject’s confrontation with the passing of time: “Patience” resumes the approach of the Rimbaldian subject, while the phrase “C’est moi,” contemporary to the moment of enunciation, constitutes the subject’s refusal to disappear that is implied by the passing of time. The most obvious comparison between these two poems is in the flora of each one; in this way, Rimbaud’s patience-plant is a response to the Ronsardian rose... by way of the Valmorian rose. 72 If the patience opens itself up to the sun during the summer of the title, the season in “C’est moi” is autumn, the season traditionally invoked to suggest the passing of time. The rose that flowers and rolls on the ground (“sur tes pas”) in the second strophe is picked, while it is shivering, languishing, and dying (“frémissante,” “languissante,” and “mourante”) in the last one. As with Ronsard, the Valmorian dying rose symbolizes the passing of time; Bertrand indicates the variant, doubtless unknown to Rimbaud, but which highlights the temporal aspect of the poem: “Ne fuis pas, ô ma vie absente!” [Do not flee, oh my absent life!].73 And yet, the great distinction between these two carpe diem poems is in the two exhortations and in their respective implications for the lyric subject. In the Sonnets à Hélène the subject addresses his beloved, “je” to “vous” (“Cueillez dés aujourd’huy […]”); in “C’est moi” it is more a question of an interior dialogue between the lyric subject and its “vie absente”: “Prends-y garde, ô ma vie absente! / C’est moi qui 71

This mention of a refrain is perhaps a good moment to point out that, two years after its first publication, this poem was set to music; see Desbordes-Valmore 1:296. 72 Boyer d’Agen indicates Musset’s influence in Desbordes-Valmore’s poem. Boyer d’Agen, Les greniers et la guitare de Marceline (Paris: Marcel Seheur, 1931), vii-ix. 73 Desbordes-Valmore 1:296.

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t’appelle en pleurant.” Even if the lyric subject in “Patience” invokes Nature on several occasions, the recipient of the words and thoughts remains silent not only because the poet does not provide an opportunity to speak, as in Ronsard, but also because the calls target the subject itself much more than an other. One might thus say that in “Patience” Rimbaud adopts the interior dialogue attempted by Desbordes-Valmore while at the same time situating the lyric subject in an approach to the passing of time that is far from the carpe diem of the Ronsardian and Valmorian models. With respect to the sentence from “C’est moi” that Rimbaud cites, the imperative verb in “Prends-y garde, ô ma vie absente!” implores the lyric subject to pay close attention to time, the key message also in “Patience,” a sort of “ça ne veux pas rien dire” [This does not mean nothing]74 written to himself. His earlier life is characterized by absence, and it is impossible to ignore the absence of the lyric subject from the first four verses of Rimbaud’s poem; without the plurals “notre sang” and “nos veins,” these first eight lines (or the first octave, as I have suggested) would be completely devoid of subjectivity. However, the reading of the patience-plant is that it must be present, that it must take a position in its own life, a position represented here by the attitude – temporal patience – that is opposed to the passing of time. In this way, and beginning with the dramatic “Je sors!” of the ninth verse, the “je” of the lyric subject is abundantly present in the poem. The second strophe presents a “je” in the four middle verses (11 through 14), surrounded by external observations in the couplets that frame it, opening and closing the stanza: “Qu’on patiente et qu’on s’ennuie, / C’est si simple!... Fi de ces peines” and “Au lieu que les bergers, c’est drôle, / Meurent à peu près par le monde” [In the place where the shepherds, it is strange, / Die approximately throughout the world]. The subject’s presence only grows in the last strophe, where he is active in nearly every line, the only three exceptions being reactions to verses that preceded them: “Et s’il te plaît, nourris, abreuve” [And if you will, feed and water me] (a response to “ma faim” [my hunger] and “ma soif” [my thirst] of line 21); “C’est rire aux parents qu’au soleil” (a response to “Rien de rien ne m’illusionne” [Nothing at all deceives me], line 23); and “Et libre soit cette infor74

Rimbaud wrote this famous line after inserting the poem “Le cœur supplicié” into the lettre du voyant to Izambard on 13 May 1871 (249).

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tune” [And may this misfortune be free] (“cette infortune” refers to “Mais moi je ne veux rire à rien” [But I do not want to laugh at anything] in line 25, and reminds us of the “Déchirante infortune!” [What heartbreaking misfortune!] that closes “L’impossible” from Une saison en enfer). From its near absence at the beginning of the poem to its omnipresence at the end, the Rimbaldian subject in “Patience” learns to situate itself vis-à-vis the passing of time without always adopting the traditional postures that can be found in poems by Ronsard and Desbordes-Valmore; in this way, “Patience” marks a significant manifestation in the battle between the lyric subject and time within Rimbaud’s work. Before the poems of Illuminations, Rimbaldian time – perturbed, déréglementé, déréglé – makes a place for itself in the poems from 1872, particularly in the series of poems from “Fêtes de la patience.” It is not surprising that the notion of patience resurfaces in “Chanson de la plus haute Tour” (77-78), in which the lyric subject exclaims: “J’ai tant fait patience / Qu’à jamais j’oublie” [I have been patient so long / That I have forgotten everything]. If in “Patience” there is a strong desire to oppose time, in this “Chanson” the subject is not afraid of passing time. Here, the first two stanzas focus on what Meyer’s “passivité passive,” a retreat where the passing of time clearly shows that nothing happens, that one wastes one’s time, even one’s life: Oisive jeunesse À tout asservie, Par délicatesse J'ai perdu ma vie. Ah! Que le temps vienne Où les cœurs s'éprennent. Je me suis dit: laisse, Et qu’on ne te voie: Et sans la promesse De plus hautes joies. Que rien ne t’arrête Auguste retraite. [Idle youth Enslaved to everything, Through sensitivity I wasted my life.

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Ah! Let the time come When hearts fall in love. I said to myself: stop, Let no one see you; And without the promise Of loftier joys. Let nothing put you off Sublime retreat.]

Ronsard’s carpe diem, which tries to seize the ephemeral moment, is importantly a view towards the future; part and parcel with its desire to live in the present is a simultaneous effort to delay off an unpleasant future, which it so clearly foresees. This view to the future is replaced in Rimbaud’s “Chanson” by an almost nostalgic desire for such a moment, since the subject has already wasted enough time doing nothing (a view that instead focuses on the past).75 By consequence, in this stance with respect to such a fugitive moment “Où les cœurs s’éprennent” the lyric subject has clearly adopted a position visà-vis the passing of time, a position that is picked up again in “que le temps vienne,” a phrase that summarizes well the impatience of the lyric subject’s situation in time and which similarly echoes the desire expressed in “Je veux bien que les saisons m’usent” from “Patience.” As for the verses “Que rien ne t’arrête, / Auguste retraite”, it is important to notice the strong and obvious link between “août,” the month of August, and the word “Auguste”; here is a nod to the conventional past that the end of the summer and the beginning of autumn provoke. While “Patience” is situated in the summer and “Chanson de la plus haute Tour” suggests autumn, the present discussion does not mean to read the poems in this series as following the four seasons; it is preferable to consider them as different visual snapshots in the fight between human beings and the passing of time, as the temporal aspects in “L’Éternité” and “Âge d’or” [Golden Age] make clear. Of all the echoes that resonate throughout this discussion of poems from 1872, perhaps the strongest is from the last part of “Adieu” from Une saison en enfer (440-41). Warning us of the present situation in 75

Jacques Plessen sees in this poem “la possibilité d’une vacuité intérieure, prémisse d’un bonheur supérieur” [the possibility of an interior emptiness, premise of a superior happiness] (Plessen 144).

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his battle against the passing of time, the subject explains that: “[...] l’heure nouvelle est au moins très-sévère” [at least the new hour is very harsh] and continues by recalling his past: memories (“Tous les souvenirs immondes s’effacent” [All filthy memories fade out]) and regrets (“Mes derniers regrets détalent, — des jalousies pour les mendiants, les brigands, les amis de la mort, les arriérés de toutes sortes. — Damnés, si je me vengeais!” [My last regrets scamper off: envoy of beggars, brigands, friends of death, backward creatures of all sorts. — You who are damned, what if I avenged myself!]). An enormous courage is required for the proposed solution of opposing traditional notions of time: “Il faut être absolument moderne” [We must be absolutely modern]. This is no longer a time for a “chanson,” be it from the highest Tower or from elsewhere: “Point de cantiques: tenir le pas gagné. Dure nuit! le sang séché fume sur ma face, et je n’ai rien derrière moi […]” [No hymns. I must hold what has been gained. Hard night! The dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing behind me]. Having nothing behind, having no past, the lyric subject has no choice but to look ahead, towards the future. And when he does so, he will have at his disposal a new weapon in the fight against time: “Cependant c’est la veille. Recevons tous les influx de vigueur et de tendresse réelle. Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes” [However this is the vigil. Let us welcome all the influxes of vigor and real tenderness. And, at dawn, armed with ardent patience, we will enter magnificent cities]. Much like the “ardente patience,” the necessary weapon for arriving at a more promising future where one will be able to “posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps” [possess truth in one body and soul] is the object with which the Rimbaldian lyric subject chooses to arm himself in order to find temporal aspects that are déréglementés, aspects that surpass traditional notions, measures and descriptions of time. Lastly from this series from 1872, a brief word on “L’Éternité,” about which the temporal is more than obvious: first, as has already been mentioned, the line from “Patience,” “Le ciel est joli comme un ange. / Azur et Onde communient,” clearly points to the eternity evoked in this poem; it is also important to note the presence, suggested by the capital letters, of everything, spelled out across the Greek alphabet as being from Alpha to Omega, and let us not forget

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that “Rimbaud knew not only the French alphabet but also the Greek.”76 The notion of eternity is buttressed by the numerous repetitions throughout this poem: first, in the vowel [e] at the beginning and end of the title word “L’Éternité,” suggesting that time comes full circle, the end returning to the beginning, with a nod to the daily and eternal cycle of the rising and setting of the sun. There is also the repetition of the stanza that is both the poem’s first and last: Elle est retrouvée. Quoi? — L’Éternité. C’est la mer allée Avec le soleil. (79) [It has been found again. What has? — Eternity. It is the sea gone off With the sun.]

In addition, at first glance it would seem that there are the repetitions within this stanza, with the rhyme-as-echo of [e] in “retrouvée,” “L’Éternité,” “allée,” and “soleil.” Rimbaud thus creates a series of concentric circles, rippling out to infinity (that is to say: they are eternal) as along the surface of the poem’s water. But no: the presence of “soleil” at the end of the quatrain creates a false rhyme between [e] (as in “blé”) and [ε] (as in “lait” and “merci”). Although the rest of the stanza speaks to an idealized eternal state in which immense natural forces come together in harmony, this “timeless present” is not as perfect as it may seem. Disrupting whatever pattern of repetition the reader might come to anticipate as reflected in the title word “L’Éternité,” Rimbaud once again destabilizes the temporal flow of the poem, creating a disjointed poetic universe. In addition, more than the repetition of a stanza in a particular classical prosodic form, such as the rondeau, this repetition surpasses the traditional rhythm and time of the poem. The poetic moment reaches out to infinity and simultaneously misses the mark of its own internal repetition; “L’Éternité” thus takes the reader beyond temporal limits in terms of both the prosodic and the lyric. 76

Stamos Metzidakis, “Did Rimbaud Really Know His Alphabet?”, NineteenthCentury French Studies, 14.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1986), 283.

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For Étiemble, eternity is the precise moment when the sun and the sea directly implicate the lyric subject: “L’éternité, c’est la joie de l’instant, pour celui qui retrouve l’esprit païen, la mer, le soleil, la nature” [Eternity is the joy of the instant, for he who finds the pagan spirit, the sea, the sun, and nature].77 This presence of the Rimbaldian subject anchors the poem in the series “Fêtes de la patience” for its treatment of man and nature, on largely temporal grounds according to Meyer: “Le secret que connaissait l’âge d’or, celui que la religion a peu à peu occulté au cours de l’histoire et remplacé par une formule fausse, a été retrouvé: l’Éternité, c’est la fusion de l’homme dans la nature” [The secret that the golden age knew, the one that religion hid little by little over the course of history and replaced with a false formula, has been found: Eternity is the fusion of man in nature].78 Contrary to “Patience,” in which the lyric subject confronts the passing of time, “L’Éternité” offers a fixed temporal absolute; as Meyer has suggested, this absolute comes from a “suppression de la temporalité, de la succession et des rapports de passé, de présent et d’avenir; ou [d’une] perpétuité dans l’être, absence de fin” [suppression of temporality, of the succession and relationships of past, present, and future; or [of a] being in perpetuity, without any end].79 It is also important to note that the temporal moment that dominates this poem has a spatial counterpart clearly evident in “L’Éternité,” a poem as visual as it is temporal. Ricœur insists on this inextricable relationship between the temporal and the spatial, going back to Augustine, for whom, “la mesure du temps se fait ‘dans un certain espace’ (in aliquo spatio) et que tous les rapports entre intervalles de temps concernent des ‘espaces de temps’ (spatia temporum)” [time is measured “in a certain space” (in aliquo spatio) and all the relationships between intervals of time concern “spaces of time” (spatia temporum)].80 The vertical union of the sun and the sea create the horizontal axis, circling the globe ad infinitum. Sea, sun; night, day: these couples set up the doubling of the lyric subject when he addresses his own “âme sentinelle” and asks to share with him the 77

Étiemble, ed. Arthur Rimbaud, Pages choisies (Paris: Librairie Larousse/Classiques Larousse, 1957), 70n1. 78 Meyer 150. 79 Meyer 149. 80 Ricœur 29-30.

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task of murmuring the confession, “De la nuit si nulle / Et du jour en feu” [Of the night so void / And of the day on fire] (“nulle” here echoing the “moins nul et moins seul” [less worthless and less alone] from “Patience” and reinforcing the connections between these two poems). However, the most important visual couple is the one that is absent from the poem and only rarely mentioned by critics: that of the reflection of the sun on the water. This double is, of course, false; as the past participle “allée” reminds us, water is always in movement, and the waves on its surface create an imperfect reflection, an approximation, of that part of the sun that still remains above the horizon. The concentric circles that ripple out from the center of this scene are just as present, physically, almost at the very center of the poem. If the horizontal axis of “L’Éternité” is between the third and fourth stanzas, one has only to go back one word – “selon” – to see a textual reflection, along a vertical axis that takes up the theme of the sun and its reflection. The verse “Et voles selon” offers a near perfect palindrome in its two last words, if only visually, with the pairs of letters “s,” “e,” “l,” and “o” moving further away from the center of the space between the two words. One could even go further and suggest that, on the manuscript in Rimbaud’s hand, the descent and the ascent of the letter “v” are reflected, albeit only slightly, in the beginning of the letter “n”; however, as has already been discussed with respect to the imperfect vowel repetition as well as the reflection of the sun on the surface of the water, the mirrored effect always creates an imperfect reflection of the original, much like in this imperfect palindrome “voles selon.” The verbes “voler” and “se dégager” suggest deliverance, and for the present reading this deliverance is an attempt at shaking loose from the temporal trap of conventional notions of time into an eternal state. To be closed into this eternal present is precisely a liberation from other more traditional temporal modes, and this liberation, a potential source of joy, recalls Baudelaire’s “La chambre double,” in which “[...] c’est l’Éternité qui règne, une éternité de délices!” [It is Eternity that reigns, an eternity of delights!].81 When, in the fourth stanza of “L’Éternité,” “Le Devoir s’exhale / Sans qu’on dise: enfin” 81

Baudelaire 1:281.

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[Duty breathes / Without any saying: at last], it is again a liberation; this time “Le Devoir” represents the typical duty of the poet: for this discussion, the liberation from duty would be in the hopes of battling against or otherwise slowing the passing of time. Furthermore, the future is nothing to fear: “Là pas d’espérance, / Nul orietur” [Here, there is no hope, / No orietur] (orietur comes from the Latin orior, meaning to rise). In terms of hope, these two verses point to a future state and immediately negate it. In addition, the use of the spatial adverb “Là” makes this a negation not only of time but of time and space simultaneously, and the lack of temporal or spatial movement comes from this poem being frozen in an eternal present. There is an even stronger negation of time and space at the end of “Les corbeaux,” published in September 1872 and perhaps composed not long before or after the “Fêtes de la patience” series and the other poems from the middle of 1872: Laissez les fauvettes de mai Pour ceux qu’au fond du bois enchaîne, Dans l’herbe d’où l’on ne peut fuir, La défaite sans avenir.82 [Leave alone the May warblers For those who, in the depths of the wood, In the grass from which there is no escape, Are enslaved by a defeat without a future.]

“Nul orietur” indeed: there is no escaping the spatial (“l’herbe”) or the temporal (“la défaite sans avenir”), and the comma after the word “fuir” conflates the two axes into one state of existence that is simultaneously mapped along both axes: time is space, space is time. Rimbaud criticism has long focused on the religious echoes in the Latin word orior. The verb orietur, conjugated here in the future tense, implies in such interpretations a birth or a rebirth, a future full of promise and/or of prophecy; the fact that the verb is negated offers 82

On the numerous similarities between “Les corbeaux” and “La rivière de Cassis,” see the notes on Brunel’s “Pochothèque” edition, 372-73. For information on the publication of “Les corbeaux” and theories surrounding its date of composition, see Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. Murphy 1:802-05. For an intriguing discussion of this poem, see Christophe Bataillé, “Rimbaud et La Renaissance: quelques hypothèses linguistiques et biographiques,” Parade sauvage 20 (December 2004), 83-92.

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an aspect that is often ignored.83 Far from his use of the word “espérance,” Rimbaud’s choice of a Latin word in verse 18 brings not only a verb but also the subject pronoun: here, third person singular. With the negation of a future state (or a state of being), “Nul orietur” removes the possibility of the presence of an other, anchoring this poem once again in the eternal present and in the internal dialogue between the lyric subject and its “âme sentinelle.” As in “Patience,” the relationship between the words “science” and “patience” are as phonetic as thematic, and patience and eternity are situations – the former being a stance of the lyric subject, the latter being a suspension or an abolition of time – that surpass traditional scientific comprehension of time. The repetition of [s] in verses 19 and 20 brings “science,” “patience,” “supplice,” and “sûr” into a near- chiasmus, science being our surest knowledge and patience an approach vis-à-vis the passing of time that is impossible to attain. Insofar as patience suggests the lyric subject’s confrontation with the passing of time (and thus it is, by extension, a source of “supplice”), it recalls the lettre du voyant from Rimbaud to Izambard on 13 May 1871, in which the poet endures a suffering that defies all traditional (or scientific) explanation or understanding: Maintenant, je m’encrapule le plus possible. Pourquoi? Je veux être poète, et je travaille à me rendre voyant: vous ne comprendrez pas du tout, et je ne saurais presque vous expliquer. Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens. Les souffrances sont énormes, mais il faut être fort, être né poète, et je me suis reconnu poète. (237) [Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a Seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet.]

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Suzanne Bernard, Hiroo Yuasa and others have indicated the numerous possible biblical references in the word orietur, whose present participle oriens is the root for the word orient; by extension, as Meyer explains, “Rimbaud oppose ici le Soleil matériel et actuel de la Nature au Soleil spirituel et futur des religions ou des philosophies, son Éternité immanente à leur Éternité transcendante” [Here Rimbaud opposes the material and natural Sun of Nature and the spiritual and future Sun of religions or philosophers, his immanent Eternity to their transcendent Eternity] (160).

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In “Âge d’or,” last in the “Fêtes de la patience” series, there are once again temporal modes that resist unified and simple understanding. Even in the title, the lack of an article gives the word “Âge”a certain ambiguity (the reader would prefer “Un âge d’or” or “L’âge d’or”); the reader is accustomed to this stylistic choice in Illuminations, but much less so in the poems from 1872 and before. The word “âge” seems to evoke a moment that is simultaneously historical and of the present (and on this point it should be noted that all the verbs of the poem are in the present tense). The song of this poem – “Si gai, si facile” [So cheerful, so easy] – is anchored, or perhaps is stuck, in the immediate present, the voice “Vertement s’explique / Et chante à l’instant” [Openly expresses itself / And sings at this moment]; it is for this reason that the lyric subject is incapable of specifying any particular historic moment, later asking “De quel Âge es-tu / Nature princière” [From what Age do you come / Princely nature]. Furthermore, if temporal aspects elude knowledge and scientific explanation in the other poems in this series, in “Âge d’or” it is historical knowledge – a knowledge based on dates that come, of course, from scientific constructions to measure time – that is lacking. The repeated and cyclical aspects that create the basic structure of “L’Éternité” are again present in “Âge d’or,” in the repetition in the eighth stanza, notably in the verse “Le monde est vicieux” [The world is given to vice], “vicieux” also referring here to the circle that never ends according to the expression “cercle vicieux” (included in Littré’s definition of “vicieux” and doubtless known to Rimbaud).84 However, the first meaning of the word – “Qui a des défauts, des imperfections graves” [Which has serious faults, imperfections] – provides another avenue for this reading. One could easily consider the time represented in this poem, as much by repetition as by the historical reference that is ahistorical, as “vicieux,” according to the grammatical definition provided by Littré: “Locution vicieuse, locution contraire à la règle et au bon usage” [Vicious locution, locution contrary to the rules and to proper usage]. In “Âge d’or,” the use of time in the Rimbaldian poetic world is decidedly contrary to the rules and to proper usage. As in “L’Éternité,” the repeated stanza contains an internal element bearing a secondary repetition, that of a suggested 84

Littré, s.v. “Vicieux.”

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vicious circle: is this the vicious circle of history repeating itself, creating a new Golden Age? Once again, the time in which the poem is situated and the time in the poem are no longer easily recognizable, no longer easy to pin down in terms of traditional temporal measurements. Despite the levity of the verse “Voix / pas du tout publiques” [Voices / Not at all public] which is obviously a play on the homophony between “voix” [voices] and “voies” [ways], this phrase retains an definite importance because it situates this poem, like the other poems in this series, in a discourse that is internal, thus private: once again in these “Fêtes de la patience” the lyric subject expresses its internal battle against exterior forces of time. It is interesting to note the inscriptions in the margins on one of the versions of this poem, published for the first time in La Vogue of 7 June 1886: first, “Terque quaterque” [three and four times]; then “Pluries” [several times]; and then at the end “Indesinenter” [without ever stopping]. “Terque quaterque” offers the familiar structure of a sound from the beginning being repeated at the end, as in “science avec patience” and the vowel sound [e] in “éternité,” thus adding emphasis to the cyclical nature of the representation of time in these poems; more important is the literal repetition that the phrase asserts. The cumulative effect of these three Latin suggestions is unavoidable, and there is a similar larger cumulative effect in the poems in this series. First, time is dominated by temporal aspects that are specific – but always problematic – in “Patience” and “Chanson de la plus haute Tour”; then comes an abundance of repetition in and between these poems, followed by the eternal present of “L’Éternité.” Coming full circle, in “Âge d’or” there is an historic moment that is unrecognizable, lacking temporal identity, existing rather in a temporal vicious circle that leads to an existence that is simultaneously historical and ahistorical, at once of the past and of the eternal present. The rough draft of Une saison en enfer clearly shows that Rimbaud had at one time intended to include “Âge d’or” in “Alchimie du verbe,” after “Chanson de la plus haute Tour” and “Éternité.” In light of the present discussion of “Âge d’or,” it is useful to note that Rimbaud dropped the title’s definite article for the version that was to be inserted into the Saison:

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Et [pour comble] De joie, je devins un opéra fabuleux. *Âge d’or. À cette [période c’était] c’était ma vie éternelle, non écrite, non chantée, — quelque chose comme la Providence / les lois du monde // l’essence (?) à laquelle on croit et qui ne chante pas. Après ces nobles minutes, [vint] stupidité complète.85 [And [what’s more] Of joy, I became a fabulous opera. *Golden Age. At this [time it was] it was my eternal life, not written, not sung, – something like Providence / the laws of the world // the essence (?) in which we believe and which does not sing. After these noble minutes, [came] complete stupidity.]

Science is supposed to bring knowledge; however, the “nobles minutes” of “la patience,” the eternal present of “l’éternité” and an ahistoric Golden Age (“âge d’or”) defy simple temporal categorization: “stupidité complète.” In other words: Ces mille questions Qui se ramifient N’amènent, au fond, Qu’ivresse et folie; [Those thousand questions Which spread about Bring, in the end, Only intoxication and madness]

Stupidity perhaps, but solely in terms of a conventional understanding and knowledge of self since it itself is based on a conventional understanding of time and space. As the series of poems of “Fêtes de la patience” has shown, the Rimbaldian lyric subject does not have the traditional knowledge, and ends up compensating for this lack by pushing to their explosion, along the axes of time and space, the very limits of existence.

85

The best reproduction among recent editions is in Brunel’s “Pochothèque” edition, 396-97.

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On “Mémoire” Without proposing an entirely new exegesis of “Mémoire” – several excellent ones are commendable in this regard – it is useful to consider the temporal aspects of this “poème de la dérive et de l’écoulement” [poem of drifting and of flow].86 In particular, “Mémoire” shares several temporal characteristics of the other poems from 1872 discussed above. The poem’s hermetic nature is evident before it even begins, starting with the title word. Michael Riffaterre is right to point out the importance of the syllepsis in “Mémoire,” notably in the words “fils,” “souci,” “lit,” and especially the title, in which we hear echoes of the homonym “mes moires.”87 The complexity in this word is noted elsewhere by Suzanne Briet, albeit in a different direction than the present discussion: “Rien ne nous oblige à choisir entre l’acception masculine et l’acception féminine de ce terme. Il semble que ‘mémoire,’ dans son imprécision même a ici le double sens de remembrance du passé et de mémorandum d’une situation donnée dans le présent” [Nothing forces us to choose between the masculine and feminine definition of this word. It seems that “mémoire,” in its very imprecision, has the double meaning here of remembering the past and of memorandum of a given situation in the present].88 If Littré defines “une moire” [moiré] as an “[…] apprêt que reçoivent, à la calandre ou au cylindre, par l’écrasement de leur grain, certaines étoffes de soie, de laine, de coton ou de lin, et qui leur communique un éclat changeant, une apparence ondée et chatoyante” [finish given, by rollers or cylinders, by the pressing of its grain, certain fabrics of silk, wool, cotton or linen, and which gives them a

86

Ross Chambers, “‘Mémoire’ de Rimbaud: Essai de lecture,” Essays in French Literature 5 (1968), 27. In addition to Chambers, see Nathaniel Wing, “Metaphor and Ambiguity in Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire’,” Romanic Review 63 (1972), 190-210; and Steve Murphy, “La poétique de la mélancolie dans ‘Mémoire’,” 261-365 in Stratégies de Rimbaud. I am grateful to Yann Frémy for his suggestions in my reading of “Mémoire.” 87 Michael Riffaterre, “Sylleptic Symbols: Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire’,” in NineteenthCentury French Poetry: Introductions to Close Readings, ed. Christopher Prendergast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 188-89. 88 Suzanne Briet, “La signification de ‘Mémoire’ poème crucial de Rimbaud,” Études rimbaldiennes 3 (1972), 36.

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changing sheen, a wavy and shimmering appearance],89 it is for this last aspect that the word is most useful in poetry. There are numerous references in poetry to “la moire” in its figurative sense, signifying what Riffaterre calls “the shifting play of light on water, silk-like reflections”90 throughout nineteenth-century French poetry. Silk is among the “objets de douceur” [objects of softness] for Richard,91 who underscores its symbolic weight most notably as it appears in “Fleurs,” a poem from Illuminations replete with echoes of the scenes depicted in “Mémoire”: D’un gradin d’or, – parmi les cordons de soie, les gazes grises, les velours verts et les disques de cristal qui noircissent comme du bronze au soleil, – je vois la digitale s’ouvrir sur un tapis de filigranes d’argent, d’yeux et de chevelures. Des pièces d’or jaune semées sur l’agate, des piliers d’acajou supportant un dôme d’émeraudes, des bouquets de satin blanc jet de fines verges de rubis entourent la rose d’eau. Tels qu’un dieu aux énormes yeux bleus et aux formes de neige, la mer et le ciel attirent aux terrasses de marbre la foule des jeunes et fortes roses. (141) [From a gold terrace, — amidst silken cords, gray veils, green velvets and crystal discs which darken like bronze in the sun, — I see the foxglove opening on a tapestry of silver threads, eyes, and hair. Pieces of yellow gold sown on the agate, mahogany pillars supporting an emerald dome, bouquets of white satin and delicate stalks of rubies surround the water-rose. Like a god with large blue eyes and a snow body, the sea and the sky entice to the marble stairs the swarm of young, strong roses.]

In order to create reflections it is necessary for water to be, as the first words of Rimbaud’s poem indicate, clear: “l’eau claire” [clear water] (as in “L’Éternité,” where the sky and “l’eau claire” meet). As a result, the quality of the water itself plays an important role in this discussion of “la moire,” and this quality of water is equally prevalent in “Bethsaïda, la piscine [...]” in which we read that: “Bethsaïda, la piscine des cinq galeries, était un point d’ennui. Il me semblait que ce fût un sinistre lavoir, toujours accablé de la pluie et noir […] L’eau était toujours noire, et nul infirme n’y tombait même en songe” [Bethsaida, the pool with five galleries, was a point of boredom. It 89

Littré, s.v. “Moiré.” “Sylleptic Symbols” 189. 91 Richard 205. 90

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resembled a sinister washhouse, always harassed with rain, and black […] The water was always black, and no cripple ever fell in, even in his dreams] (163). According to Richard, “[…] le noircissement des teintes indique très souvent chez Rimbaud une imminence de création” [the darkening of shades often indicates in Rimbaud an imminence of creation],92 and water in this prose work undergoes a remarkable transformation: after the dark water of the beginning and the “everyday” water93 upon which the sun “laissait s’étaler une grande faux de lumière sur l’eau ensevelie” [allowed a large scythe of light to spread out over the buried water] and where “dans ce reflet, pareil à un ange blanc couché sur le côté, tous les reflets infiniment pâles remuaient” [in the reflection, similar to a white angel lying on his side, all the infinitely pale reflections stirred], once Jesus enters the water we read that “La lumière dans la piscine était jaune comme les dernières feuilles des vignes” [The light in the pool was yellow like the last leaves of the vineyard]. This visual aspect, central to the notion of “la moire,” is also suggested in the next part of Littré’s definition: “[...] la beauté de la moire [réside] dans la variété des dessins changeant avec la position du spectateur [...]” [the beauty of moiré [rests] in the variety of shapes changing with the spectator’s position]. Beyond Rimbaud’s work, the Baudelairian vessels of “La chevelure” glide “dans l’or et dans la moire” [in gold and in moiré] and open “leurs vastes bras pour embrasser la gloire” [their vast arms to embrace glory]; in another example, Riffaterre points to Banville’s poem “Silence”: Pour baiser la prairie et le ruisseau dormant Qui déroule ses moires, Un beau rayon frileux glisse furtivement Parmi les branches noires.94 92

Richard 205. According to Pierre Brunel, the discrepancy in time between the beginning (“le soleil de 2h. ap. midi”) and the end (“aussitôt après l’heure de midi”) can be explained quite simply by the fact that the first temporal moment is one that takes place every day, whereas the second one represents a particular day; see Brunel’s edition, 391n7. 94 Riffaterre also mentions Valéry (“Le rameur” from Charmes); see “Sylleptic Symbols” 189-90 and 198nn10-11. In Rimbaud’s work, the “Casquette / De moire” (Cap / Of silk) rhymes with the “Quéquette / D’ivoire” (Prick / Of ivory) in “Jeune goinfre” (210) but this appearance is not particularly helpful in the present discussion of “la moire,” of the Moirae, or of “mémoire,” and the same can be said of the verse 93

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[To kiss the prairie and the sleeping stream That unfurls its moirés, A handsome, nervous ray of sunlight slides furtively Among the black branches.]

But the connection between the words “moire” and “mémoire,” most interesting to the present discussion, is also evident in numerous poems, and it is for this reason that Riffaterre cites Banville’s “Songe d’hiver” [Thought of winter] from Les cariatides, which contains the following verses: Et moi, j’étais plus triste encor Lorsque, comme en un fleuve d’or, Je remontais dans ma mémoire, Et que d’un regard triomphant Je revoyais mes jours d’enfant Couler d’émeraude et de moire, Puis engouffrer leurs tristes flots Au fond d’une mer sombre et noire Avec des bruits et des sanglots.95 [And I was even sadder still When, like in a river of gold, I went back in my memories, And with a triumphant glance I saw again my childhood days Flow with emerald and moiré, Then plunge down their sad waves To the bottom of a somber and black sea With sounds and sobs.]

If the “moire” “chang[e] avec la position du spectateur,” it is a useful image for memory for its rapport between a past and a present that, themselves, also change along with the spectator’s perspective or position.

“Des cieux moirés de vert baignent les fronts vermeils” [Skies shimmering with green bathe the ruddy Brows] from “Les premières Communions” (62). 95 Other examples include Mallarmé’s poem “Hommage” (“Le silence déjà funèbre d’une moire [...]”; Georges Rodenbach’s poem “L’eau des anciens canaux [...]” from Les vies encloses; and, later in the same collection, the poem “Quel aquarium glauque apparaît la Mémoire” bears the internal rhyme “Dans le repos de la Mémoire qui s’en moire.”

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The temporal link between past and present that is evoked by memory recalls the theoretical supports of the Bergsonian discussion of time, between an objective time and duration and also the Augustinian notion of eternity. In addition, it reminds us of William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem,” with the famous verse “I see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once / Before me.”96 The juxtaposition in “Mémoire” of tenses, one on top of the other, implies severe consequences for the lyric subject in the act of memory; since the passing of time implies the eventual death of the subject and also the eventual loss of memories, the subject once again finds himself in a battle with time, this time between the acts of remembering and forgetting. To remember, to bring memories to the surface of one’s consciousness, is to reestablish one’s self and to reaffirm one’s existence. However, remembering is not exactly reliving one’s past, since the memory evoked is always but an approximation of the lived experience, passed through a filter – a temporal filter – that distorts even as it brings memories closer. On this point, Ricœur cites the Augustinian notion of the song, “qui englobe celui du son qui dure et cesse et celui des syllabes longues et brèves” [which includes the sound that lasts and ends and that of long and short syllables],97 an example that shows the tensions in waiting, memory, and attention. If drawing on memory is a manner of extending one’s place in time as well as an act that seeks a potential future repetition of this recalling, the memory changes each time that it is recalled, each time diminished, enhanced, or otherwise reinvented. Memory is thus a trap, a reflection of lived experience that betrays the very experience while it attempts to represent it; for this reason, the parallel with “la moire” is clear: the approximation of memories is a version that is less clear, or “moirée,” of the lived past, just as the water’s surface reflects the sky which sits above the horizon. There is another aspect of the word “mémoire” that has not yet been considered by Rimbaud criticism. In Greek mythology:

96

William Blake, The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 21 November 2005 . 97 Augustine 28, 38; Ricœur 39.

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Les Moires sont la personnification du destin de chacun, du lot qui lui échoit en ce monde. À l’origine, chaque humain a sa “moira,” ce qui signifie sa part (de vie, de bonheur, de malheur, etc.). […] Impersonnelle, la Moire est aussi inflexible que le destin; elle incarne une loi que même les dieux ne peuvent transgresser sans mettre l’ordre du monde en péril. […] Peu à peu, il semble que se soit développée l’idée d’une Moire universelle, dominant la destinée de tous les humains et, surtout après les épopées homériques, de trois Moires, les trois sœurs, Atropos, Clotho et Lachésis, qui, pour chaque mortel, réglaient la durée de sa vie depuis la naissance jusqu’à la mort, à l’aide d’un fil, que l’une filait, que la seconde enroulait, et que la troisième coupait, lorsque la vie correspondante étant achevée. Ces trois fileuses sont filles de Zeus et de Thémis, et les sœurs des Heures.98 [The Moirae are the personification of everyone’s destiny, of the fate that they share in this world. In the beginning, each human had his/her “moira,” which meant their lot (of life, of happiness, of sadness, etc.). […] Impersonal, the Moira is as inflexible as destiny; it incarnates a law that even the gods could not transgress without putting the order of the world in peril. […] Little by little, it seems that the idea of a universal Moira developed, dominating the destiny of all humans and, especially after Homer’s epics, the three Moirae – the three sisters: Atropos, Clotho and Lachesis – who, for each mortal, ruled over the duration of life from birth to death, with the aid of a thread, that one spun, that the second rolled, and that the third cut, when the corresponding life was done. These three spinners are daughters of Zeus and Themis, and sisters of the Hours.]

These Moirae, who become Parques in the Roman tradition (and in the poetry of Paul Valéry and others), represent destiny and, consequently, humans’ inability to stop time; on this point there are echoes in Rimbaud’s line “Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps” from “À une Raison.” This polysemy moire / Moire is also evident in Verlaine’s sonnet “Sappho,” in which Sappho “saute dans la mer où l’appelle la Moire” [jumps into the sea where the Moira calls], this verse rhyming with the preceding quatrain: Puis elle évoque, en des remords sans accalmies, Ces temps où rayonnait, pure, la jeune gloire De ses amours chantés en vers que la mémoire De l’âme va redire aux vierges endormies: (ŒP 489)

98

Pierre Grimal, Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), 300. Many thanks to Charles Muskiet and John Hunt for their comments on the Moirae.

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[Then she evokes, in constant remorse, Those times when shone, pure, the young glory Of her loves sung in verses that memory Of the soul will recall to sleeping virgins]

The importance of this definition in the present discussion of the polysemy of words in Rimbaud’s poetry is clear: the verses “la prairie / prochaine où neigent les fils du travail” [the field / nearby where the filaments from the work/thread snow down] take on an entirely new significance if we are to consider the word “fils” and its ambiguity, upon which Rimbaud critics have been right to insist.99 The presence of the Moirae in the title brings through the word “fils” the threads of time, suggesting thus a linear conception of time. As Murphy remarks, the word “prochaine” functions in both the temporal and spatial realms, following its two definitions, as it does in two of Verlaine’s poems from May-July 1872.100 This title “Mémoire” bears thus a temporal contradiction. On the one hand, there is the return to the past suggested by memory, the juxtaposition or rapprochement of the past and the present; this proximity is supported by the ides of “la moire,” the past reflected on the present. On the other hand, the threads sewn by the Moirae represent absolutely linear chronology, an extremely traditional evocation of time. In calling on “tous les sens” of “Mémoire,” Rimbaud puts into question the traditional notion of time not by destroying the notion of chronology and proposing something new, but rather by creating a poetic universe governed by the very tensions suggested in the title. Thesis and antithesis coexist. The poem opens in a universe of clarity (“l’eau claire”) and with a list of nouns that, with the exception of “enfance,” all lack any temporal specificity: L’eau claire; comme le sel des larmes d’enfance, l’assaut au soleil des blancheurs des corps de femmes; la soie, en foule et de lys pur, des oriflammes sous les murs dont quelque pucelle eut la défense

99

On this point, see Michael Riffaterre, “Hermeneutic Models,” Poetics Today 4.1 (1983), in particular 8-9. As Riffaterre rightly states, it is not a question of choosing between different meanings, but rather letting all the resonances of each word come to the surface, if not simultaneously than at least successively (10-11). 100 Stratégies 308.

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l’ébat des anges; — Non … le courant d’or en marche, [Clear water; like the salt of childhood tears, the assault on the sun by the whiteness of women’s bodies; the silk of banners, in masses and of pure lilies, under the walls a maid once defended; the play of angels; — no … the golden current on its way]

Nathaniel Wing’s comments on the beginning of this poem are completely just: The first section of the poem is striking in part because it does not establish the expected chronological perspective which would permit the reader to distinguish between impressions concurrent with the time of narration and those recalled from the past. Though perhaps the most obvious, this is only one of the many textual elements which oppose literary conventions of that most stereotyped of Romantic traditions, the poetic revery on past time inspired by a natural scene. […] The term enfance might be expected to resolve the problem of time perspective, suggesting childhood memories. There is no clear temporal sequence; as the boundaries between visual and emotive have been blurred, those between past and present are similarly destroyed.101

The “Non” that closes the first hemistiche of this second stanza marks a rupture on nearly every level: semantically rejecting the previous statement; shattering the rhythm established by the beginning of the poem both by its position in the line and by the abundance of punctuation surrounding it; and preparing the terrain for the spatiotemporal movement to follow, in the present tense, in “le courant d’or en marche, / meut ses bras.”102 If there is a preponderance of feminine attributes in this poem – and Rimbaud criticism has been right to insist on the poem’s rhymes, all feminine – in “Mémoire” the central union is between water and sun, one force feminine (“l’eau”) and the other masculine (“le soleil”).103 The water loses its clarity and begins to pale: “l’eau 101

“Metaphor and Ambiguity” 191 and 193; original emphasis. Jean-Pierre Giusto discusses the semantic as well; see his “Explication de ‘Mémoire’,” Études rimbaldiennes 3 (1972), 47. 103 In his article on an earlier version of this poem bearing the title “d’Edgar Poe. Famille maudite,” Murphy signals “l’équivalence entre Eau et Madame, soleil et homme” [the equivalence between Water and Lady, sun and man] (“Enquête préliminaire sur une ‘Famille maudite’,” Parade sauvage 20 [December 2004], 105). 102

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meuble d’or pâle et sans fond les couches prêtes” [The water fills the prepared beds with pale bottomless gold]. The sun’s purities – “plus pur qu’un louis, jaune et chaude paupière” [Purer than a louis, a yellow and warm eyelid] – suffer after being passed through the moire on the water. Worse still, the situation does not improve when the sun attains its apex in the sky, even if “midi prompt” offers the reader the hope of an optimal situation both for the sun’s capacity to illuminate and for its optimal physical situation in the sky in the precise middle of the symmetrical daily arc: “au midi prompt, de son terne miroir, jalouse / au ciel gris de chaleur la Sphère rose et chère” [At prompt noon, from its dim mirror, vies / With the dear rose Sphere in the sky grey with heat]. As Ross Chambers has noted, “le triste miroir de l’eau n’est qu’un morne reflet” [the sad mirror of water is but a dull reflection]104 and the masculine presence (the sun) dominates here too powerfully, turning the sky gray instead of clear or light blue. Without specifically evoking the sunset as in “L’Éternité,” here water and sun, personified, take leave of each other at the end of the day: Hélas, Lui, comme mille anges blancs qui se séparent sur la route, s’éloigne par delà la montagne! Elle, toute froide, et noire, court! après le départ de l’homme! [Alas, He, like a thousand white angels separating on the road, goes off beyond the mountain! She, all cold and dark, runs! after the departing man!]

Although others react to the sunset by turning to the past – “Regret des bras épais” [Longings for the thick young arms] and “Joie / des chantiers riverains à l’abandon” [Joy / of abandoned boatyards] – the water stays in the present: “Qu’elle pleure à présent sous les remparts!” [Let her weep now under the ramparts!]. If the sun’s reflection on the water’s surface evokes the reflection of the past on the present in the act of memory, it comes as no surprise to see this scene deIn a manner that is more general but no less important, Charles D. Minahen has recently discussed the slippage between the masculine and feminine attributes in Rimbaud’s work, and in this poem in particular, including when the (masculine) sun becomes this (feminine) “Sphère rose et chère” (conference presentation). 104 Chambers 31.

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scribed in terms of what is missing, underscored by a deictic in the present: “c’est la nappe, sans reflets, sans source, grise” [there is the surface, without reflection, with springs, gray]. The entrance of the lyric subject is marked by its own immobility in the middle of the river: “un vieux, dragueur, dans sa barque immobile, peine. // Jouet de cet œil d’eau morne, je n’y puis prendre, / ô canot immobile!” [an old man, dredger, in his motionless boat, labors. // Toy of this sad eye of water, I cannot pluck, / o! motionless boat!]. How should we understand this scene, in which “The Poet depicts himself as a helpless object [...] straining for the inaccessible”?105 To be sure, the roses in “Les roses des roseaux dès longtemps dévorées!” [The roses of the reeds devoured long ago!] are far from Ronsard’s, discussed earlier, from “Cueillez dés aujourd’huy les roses de la vie.” But such is what the flora take aim at here: the Rimbaldian flowers are precisely the ones that represent memory, stuck for all eternity in their vivacity but, at the moment of being recalled, in “real time” they have already been devoured, rotten away long ago. To the carpe diem (Ronsardian, but more generally classical) that views the present out of fear for the future, his passage opposes a vision towards the past and towards the passing time, the time that even goes past “Mon canot, toujours fixe” [My boat still stationary]. This temporal stance is yet another example of a response in Rimbaud’s poetry to time as represented in the classical universe, once again through the realm of the floral. The nod to Ronsard and classical poetry is even more noteworthy if we are to consider that this verse is one of the only classical alexandrine verses in which there are no obstacles to its fluidity: punctuation, enjambments, etc. Michel Murat is right to insist on “l’altération caractéristique du vers” [the characteristic alteration of verse] in this poem, and he points to examples of the feminine “e” in the seventh position, after the caesura in these twelve-syllable verses (verses 12, 19, and 37); 106 however, Murat’s examples all contain interruptions in punctuation in the first four syllables, whereas the verse “Les roses des roseaux dès longtemps dévorées!” has none. As Murat states, “Mémoire” is exemplary because, on the level of its versification, Rimbaud adds to verse poetry the continuity typically

105 106

Wing, “Metaphor and Ambiguity” 208. L’art de Rimbaud 62.

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associated with prose; 107 in this respect he creates what could be called a metric that is “moirée” (leaning towards prose) rather than a metrical “mémoire.”108 In other words, the verse “Les roses des roseaux dès longtemps dévorées!” is a fluid verse, “moiré,” and as such its versification and the flow of water and time are in direct contrast with the immobility of the lyric subject, “Mon canot, toujours fixe.” The Moirae reappear at the end of the poem in the image of the chain and remind us of Bergson’s notion of temporal succession: […] nous projetons le temps dans l’espace, nous exprimons la durée en étendue, et la succession prend pour nous la forme d’une ligne continue ou d’une chaîne, dont les parties se touchent sans se pénétrer. Remarquons que cette dernière image implique la perception, non plus successive, mais simultanée, de l’avant et de l’après, et qu’il y aurait contradiction à supposer une succession, qui ne fût que succession, et qui tînt néanmoins dans un seul et même instant.109 [we project time in space, we express duration in expanse, and for us the succession takes the shape of a continuous line or a chain of which the parts touch without penetrating each other. We note that this last image implies the perception – not successive, but simultaneous – of the before and the after, and that it would be contradictory to suppose a succession, which would only be a succession, and which happens in a sole and unique instant.]

In closing the present discussion of “Mémoire,” let us consider once again Ross Chambers, for whom: “la conclusion s’impose: la prison ‘sans bords’ d’où le poète ne peut échapper est celle de la temporalité, d’un temps éprouvé comme un écoulement sans fin” [the conclusion is essential: the prison “without borders” from which the poet cannot escape is that of temporality, of a time felt as an endless flow].110 Time is problematized to such an extent in this poem that the lyric subject loses all its recognizable temporal markers, heralding the poems of Illuminations, to which we shall now turn. Beyond time, the subject ends up framing the temporal question of existence in spatial terms: “au fond de cet œil d’eau sans bords, — à quelle boue?” [in the bottom of this rimless eye of water, — in what mud?]. Rimbaud’s poem “Mémoire” is not a voyage “Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!” [To the depths of the Unknown to find the new!] in the 107

L’art de Rimbaud 61; see the excellent discussion by Murat on this point, 61-66. This clever turn of phrase comes from Yann Frémy. 109 Bergson 68. 110 Chambers 27. 108

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Baudelairian sense because, in the Rimbaldian poetic universe, the unknown is not a destination that is external to the subject but rather one that resides in the time and space that surround and define him.

Time and Space, Illuminated While the Rimbaldian subject is successful in creating, or at least finding, a way to construct identity that is beyond our conventional understanding of space and time, this difficult task produces an uneasy result. As the poems from Illuminations show, “le dérèglement de tous les sens” might be the key toward a new poetic time and space, but the lyric subject is forever destabilized as a result of this process. Having shrugged off traditional temporal and spatial markers, Rimbaud’s poems in Illuminations demonstrate that the categories of meaning, sense, and direction are, just like the lyric subject whose existence depends on them, irrevocably problematic, never again to be recognized or described in conventional terms. Despite similarities across poems, we must avoid the temptation to consider his vast collection of poems as a whole; never published together by Rimbaud, their order and coherence will forever remain open interpretation and debate.111 Instead, they are individual pieces, each with its peculiarities in content and form, all sharing a similar spirit and each disturbing commonly held notions on which comfortable human existence relied. On this note, I concur with Michel Murat, who explains that “Chaque texte invente sa formule rythmique, débordant de bien des manières l’opposition tranchée entre prose et poésie. Aucune unité poétique ne préexiste plus au poème; celui-ci crée ses propres unités” [Each text invents its own rhythmic formula, going beyond in many ways the clear opposition between prose and poetry. No longer does any poetic unity precede the poem; the poem creates its own unities].112 The present chapter chooses thus to focus on several poems from Illumi-

111

See Steve Murphy, “Les Illuminations manuscrites: Pour dissiper quelques malentendus concernant la chronologie et l’ordre du dernier recueil de Rimbaud.” Histoires littéraires 1 (2000), 5-31. 112 Michel Murat, “À propos de ‘Mouvement’,” Parade sauvage 4 (1986), 72.

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nations to discuss how the realization of Rimbaud’s poetic project seems to defy commonly held understandings of time and space.113 One of Rimbaud’s poems from Illuminations that demonstrate best the major elements of this study is “Barbare”: Bien après les jours et les saisons, et les êtres et les pays, Le pavillon en viande saignante sur la soie des mers et des fleurs arctiques; (elles n’existent pas.) Remis des vieilles fanfares d’héroïsme — qui nous attaquent encore le cœur et la tête — loin des anciens assassins — Oh! Le pavillon en viande saignante sur la soie des mers et des fleurs arctiques; (elles n’existent pas.) Douceurs! Les brasiers, pleuvant aux rafales de givre, — Douceurs! — les feux à la pluie du vent de diamants jetée par le cœur terrestre éternellement carbonisé pour nous. — Ô monde! — (Loin des vieilles retraites et des vieilles flammes, qu’on entend, qu’on sent,) Les brasiers et les écumes. La musique, virement des gouffres et choc des glaçons aux astres. Ô Douceurs, ô monde, ô musique! Et là, les formes, les sueurs, les chevelures et les yeux, flottant. Et les larmes blanches, bouillantes, — ô douceurs! — et la voix féminine arrivée au fond des volcans et des grottes arctiques. Le pavillon... (144-45) [Long after the days and the seasons, and the people and the countries, The flag of red meat over the silk of the seas and the Arctic flowers (but they do not exist.) Recovering from the old fanfares of heroism – which still attack our heart and our head – far from the former assassins – Oh! The flag of red meat over the silk of the seas and the Arctic flowers (but they do not exist) Happiness! The blazing fires streaming in the frosty gusts, – Happiness! The fires in the rain of the wind of diamonds hurled down by the world’s heart endlessly burned for us. – O world! – (Far from the old places and the old fire we hear and smell.)

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There are already many excellent studies on Illuminations, including Pierre Brunel, Éclats de la violence (Paris: José Corti, 2004); Bruno Claisse, Rimbaud ou “le dégagement rêvé (Charleville-Mézières: Musée-Bibliothèque Arthur Rimbaud, 1990); André Guyaux, Poétique du fragment: Essai sur les Illuminations de Rimbaud (Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière, 1985); and Antoine Raybaud, Fabrique d’Illuminations (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Studies that focus on specific temporal and spatial matters include Gerald Macklin, “The Reinvention of Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Illuminations”; and Roger Little, Rimbaud, Illuminations, in particular 44-57.

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Fires and foam. Music, turning of the abysses and collisions of icicles with the stars. O happiness, o world, o music! Here, forms, sweating, hair and eyes, floating. And white tears, boiling – o happiness! – and the voice of a woman coming from the depths of the volcanoes and arctic grottoes. The flag…]

From the very beginning of “Barbare,” it is evident that this poem is characterized by an almost constant state of interruption in time and space, both evident in the abrupt ending of the subject- and verb-less first line: “The first line of ‘Barbare’ [...] immediately sets up a contrast between [...] known categories of time, space, and existence, and an ‘après’ which will follow them with something outside these categories, which the reader has yet to discover.”114 Any hope of establishing a rhythmic pattern is thwarted by the fact that this poem “consiste en effet d’unités nominales juxtaposées (substantifs, adjectifs, constructions verbales en transformations nominales, etc.), rythmiquement ponctuées par des exclamations” [consists in fact of juxtaposed nominal units [nouns, adjectives, verbal constructions in nominal transformations, etc.], rhythmically punctuated by exclamations].115 The poem’s title is equally troublesome, since, while it suggests a distant past time in history, it is immediately opposed by the temporal cue in the first phrase, “Bien après les jours et les saisons, et les êtres et les pays.” In this juxtaposition, Rimbaud places the moment of poetic expression in question, situating it in a moment that somehow stretches from the farthest reaches of any understanding of history – to a time when everything was “barbare” – to the futuremost moment imaginable, a time that exists after everything that can be understood is no longer. As a result, the rest of “Barbare” is linked to this uprooting of a comfortable understanding of time that would traditionally be described in terms of “past,” “present,” and “future.” The temporal situation and the description of the pavilion are present, but not because of the hand of any typical poetic subject; in “Barbare,” Rimbaud’s poetic subject creates, changes his mind, and then 114

Dierdre Reynolds, “‘L’hallucination des mots’: Textual and Imaginary Space in Rimbaud’s ‘Barbare’,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 28.1 (1992), 30. 115 Atle Kittang, Discours et jeu: Essai d’analyse des textes d’Arthur Rimbaud (Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget; Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1975), 299.

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denies the existence of arctic flowers in the parenthetical remark “elles n’existent pas.” Here the reader is presented with a new conception of the creative act of poetry, one that results in putting in question the entire poem; while reading the poem, one cannot help but feel that the entire poem might be pulled out from under the reader and rendered non-existent at any moment. Furthermore, the fact that the subject uses the plural subject pronoun “nous” (and, later, the general pronoun “on” in the parenthetical phrase “qu’on entend, qu’on sent”) indicates that the poet who refuses the existence of flowers is both as powerful as a traditional poetic subject / creator and as one of the poem’s readers. As a result, he places serious doubts on the nature of his own existence as a poetic subject. As Deirdre Reynolds states: Perhaps the most obvious consequence of perceiving the text in this way is that it literally opens up new directions of reading. Not only is this in keeping with the freedom of movement evoked in imaginary space, but patterns of dynamism in imaginary space are reflected in analogous rhythmic and graphical patterns in textual space. The alternation of descending and ascending movement in imaginary space is enacted in textual structures which suggest the possibility of arranging the text ‘vertically’ as well as “horizontally,” emphasizing the height and depth which are essential to the position and movement of objects in imaginary space.116

But what is left of a poem after a reader is forced to dismiss markers of time and question the existence of everything in the poem, the poetic subject included? It is clear that poems in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, like “Barbare,” place significant hurdles in the path toward traditional comprehension of poetry, and thus force their readers to approach the act of reading and interpreting differently. “Barbare” ends at its climactic moment with the arrival of an expression that is beyond the capacity of language: “la voix féminine arrivée au fond des volcans et des grottes arctiques.” It should be first noted that this feminine voice has arrived; this action which lacks a clear motivating force implies that the poetic subject does not play an active role in bringing this mode of expression to the poem, but rather that the expression comes from elsewhere without the subject’s doing anything whatsoever. Since it is part of the nature of the volcanoes and grottos, the voice, while combining the poem’s musical and corporal 116

Reynolds 37.

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elements, presents a volatile and far-off nature as a source of an expression that, like the poem’s abundant exclamations and repetitions, subverts and surpasses traditional meaning, fulfilling Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens.”

Hortense Found, in Time “... l’horlogerie, pour moi, a toujours été un art poétique, presqu’un culte” [clock-making, for me, has always been a poetic art, almost a religion]117

Perhaps as much as any of the poems in Illuminations, “H” forces the reader to draw on “le dérèglement de tous les sens,” to go in all directions and consider all meanings: Toutes les monstruosités violent les gestes atroces d’Hortense. Sa solitude est la mécanique érotique, sa lassitude, la dynamique amoureuse. Sous la surveillance d’une enfance elle a été, à des époques nombreuses, l’ardente hygiène des races. Sa porte est ouverte à la misère. Là, la moralité des êtres actuels se décorpore en sa passion ou en son action — Ô terrible frisson des amours novices sur le sol sanglant et par l’hydrogène clarteux! trouvez Hortense. (151) [All forms of monstrosity violate the atrocious gestures of Hortense. Her solitude is erotic mechanics, her weariness is the dynamics of love. Under the guardianship of childhood she has been, at many periods of time, the passionate hygiene of races. Her door is opened to poverty. There, the morals of real beings disembody in her passion or her action. – O terrible thrill of new loves on the blood covered ground and in the white hydrogen! find Hortense.]

Regardless of one’s interpretation of “H,” there is little doubt that the word “Hortense” is central to any attempt at understanding this poem. Its two appearances in the poem, together with the title letter, which refers back to the word Hortense, all create a cyclical effect, almost dizzying in its repetition (underscored by the preponderance of the letter “h” throughout the poem). The circle created by the repeating appearances of “H” and “Hortense” is a barrier, a limit; this fact is 117

Louis-André Borsendorff, À propos de chronométrie: Histoire d’une montre racontée par elle-même, sa vie et ses péripéties suivi d’un dialogue sur l’horlogerie entre Monsieur Trottevite et Monsieur Vabien (Paris: Borsendorff, 1869), 98-99.

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emphasized by the fact, evident in Littré’s dictionary, that the letter H can also suggest a hedge, an enclosure.118 Thus, the beginning of the poem offers both closure and en-closure when, upon reading the poem’s last words, the reader is ushered back to the title, coming full circle, with hopes of a better understanding. So this reading begins at the beginning and at the end, for they refer to each other; taking together both title and referent, the present interpretation of this poem is based on the meaning of “Hortense.” Among the numerous interpretations of this name is that of Roger Little, who breaks the word apart into syllabic entities as “hors tends ce.”119 But instead of breaking up the title into possible homophonic units, why not read a word that is there in both sound and spelling? This study endorses a different scansion of the title word, reading “Hortense” as “hors-tense.” With the prevalence of foreign words scattered throughout Illuminations (including the title of the poem that appears above “H” on the same piece of paper in Rimbaud’s hand, “Bottom”), such a breakup of the word “Hortense,” juxtaposing two languages in one word, creates in itself a kind of linguistic “monstruosité.” The meaning of the English word “tense” is helpful in that it is both “a distinction of form in a verb to express past, present, or future time or duration of the action or state it denotes” and “stretched tight; made taught.”120 The polyvalence of “tense,” then, echoes one aspect of Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens” in that the reader must consider all the possible meanings of each word as he or she reads the poem. With the goal of finding Hortense, then, one looks for something that, being outside of all that is tense, is beyond distinctions of time such as past, present, and future; and loose and free of pressure or constraints. Thus, “hors-tense” can be interpreted as a search for a liberated, extra-temporal expression, similar to the subversion of divisions of time that has just been discussed with respect to “Barbare.” 118

Littré, s.v. “H.” “‘H’: L’Énigme au-delà de l’énigme,” Revue des sciences humaines 56.184 (Oct.Dec. 1981), 136. An exhaustive listing of the numerous interpretations of this title word, as well as the poem itself, can be found in André Guyaux’s thorough chapter, “‘H’, comme Hermétisme,” 107-42 in Duplicités de Rimbaud (Paris: Champion, 1991). 120 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, s.v. “Tense.” 119

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As for the persona of “Hortense,” it should come as no surprise that the notions of time and pressure that are inherent in the word “tense” come together precisely in a body; in a military setting, Michel Foucault has written at length on temporal controls imposed on the body, saying, “la position du corps, des membres, des articulations est définie; à chaque mouvement sont assignées une direction, une amplitude, une durée; leur ordre de succession est prescrit. Le temps pénètre le corps, et avec lui tous les contrôles minutieux du pouvoir” (the position of the body, of members, of articulations is defined; direction, amplitude, and duration are assigned to each movement; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body, and with it all the minuscule controls of power].121 It is only beyond the kinds of restrictions of Foucault’s model that, according to Plato, poetic creativity can exist. As Michel Collot explains: Le poète, selon Platon, ne devient “capable de créer,” qu’à partir du moment où il est hors de soi (ekphrôn), et où “son esprit ne réside plus en lui” (meketi en autô enè). Il ne se possède plus, dans la mesure où il est possédé (katechomenos) par une instance à la fois intérieure et radicalement étrangère […] Cette possession et cette dépossession manifestent l’emprise sur la subjectivité lyrique d’une altérité […]122 [The poet, according to Plato, only becomes “capable of creating” only at the moment when he is outside his self (ekphrôn), and where “his spirit is no present in him” (meketi en autô enè). He no longer possesses himself, in the sense that he is possessed (katechomenos) by an instance at once interior and radically exterior […] This possession and this dispossession show the ascendancy of an alterity over lyric subjectivity.]

Specifically in Rimbaud’s poetry, the body is the locus upon which these forces of corporal possession and de-possession are played out, throughout time and throughout the Illuminations. Indeed, the richness of this poem resides specifically in the intersection of body, language, and pressure, played out in the personification of Hortense: “[...] trouver la solution de l’énigme représentée par Hortense, ce serait d’abord trouver la solution constituée par Hortense en tant que figure de féminité” [to find the solution to the enigma represented by 121

Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 178. 122 Michel Collot, La Matière-émotion (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), 30.

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Hortense would be first to find the solution constituted by Hortense as figure of femininity].123 While there are numerous possible interpretations for this proper name, one works particularly well with the scansion “hors-tense” that has already been established, evident in Littré’s definition of the word “hortensia”: Terme de botanique. Arbrisseau du Japon (hortensia rose), dit aussi rose du Japon, qui est cultivé comme plante d’agrément, hydrangea hortensia, DC. famille des saxifragées; il porte des fleurs qui naissent en corymbes touffus; il a été importé en Europe dans les dernières années du XVIIIe siècle [...]. -ETYM. Le nom de cette plante vient de ce que Commerson la dédia à une amie appelée Hortense, qui fut la femme de Lepeaute, célèbre horloger de Paris, LEGOARANT.124 [Term of botany. Shrub from Japan (hortensia rose), also called rose of Japan, which is cultivated as a houseplant, hydrangea hortensia, DC. Family of saxifragales; it carries flowers that are born in thick corymbs; it was brought to Europe in the last years of the XVIIIth century [...]. –ETYM. The name of this plant comes from the fact that Commerson dedicated it to a friend named Hortense, who was the wife of Lepeaute, famous Paris clockmaker, LEGOARANT.]

The name of this flower is more than just an anecdote about being named for a woman by a man other than her husband, who happens to be a clock-maker. While it is not impossible that Rimbaud was familiar, however vaguely, with her name or with this naming (although Brunel says, “tout ceci ne nous avance guère, et même pas du tout” [all this does not help us at all, and even not one bit]125), such a clear connection to a real woman is not necessary for the current reading of “H.” What matters most in Littré’s definition is its parallel with Rimbaud’s personification, both of which lead to that which is “out of time”: a woman who is defined by her relation to dominant forces (her husband and/or time). Her very name is a paradox: though married to the famous clock-maker, Hortense is out of time; like the poet, she tries to find the moments that, timeless, cannot be captured by her husband’s ubiquitous machines. 123

Pierre Brunel, “La poétique de l’énigme — Une devinette: ‘H’.” “Minute d’éveil” — Rimbaud maintenant (Paris: CDU et SEDES réunis, 1984), 193. 124 Littré, s.v. “Hortensia.” Larousse’s definition of the same word coincides curiously with the present study’s scansion of the word “Hortense”: “HORTENSIA s.m. (ortan-si-a — de Hor-tense, nom de femme)” (Larousse, s.v. “Hortensia”; the hyphen that divides “Hortense” comes at the end of a line of text). 125 “La poétique de l’énigme — Une devinette: ‘H’” 188.

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“[T]rouvez Hortense,” then, is not just a riddle that has frustrated critics for over a century in which the poet seems to speak directly to the reader. The last two words of “H” set up not just a reader’s search for an answer within the poem but rather humanity’s search for means to escape the rigid confines of conventional measures of time. Another poetic expression of such an attempt to overcome the limits of time can be seen in John Milton’s “On Time”: When once our heavenly-guided soul shall climb, Then all this earthly grossness quit, Attired with stars, we shall for ever sit, Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.126

Such extra-temporal expression offers one of William Blake’s many affinities with Rimbaud; calling it “imagination,” Blake explains: This World of Imagination is Infinite & Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Temporal. [...] The Human Imagination ... appear’d to Me ... throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be Establish’d [...]. In Eternity one Thing never Changes into another Thing. Each Identity is Eternal.127

As the closed circle formed by “H” and “Hortense” would have it, and as Blake indicates, the search for “H” is eternal because the identity of “H” is eternal; therefore, “trouvez Hortense” is the eternal search for the eternal; in short, this poem offers the map for the endless search for the moment of poetry. Having dissected “Hortense” as “hors-tense” and put her back together again to see her as the personification of a life dominated by time, the reader can come full circle and return to the title. Not only does the “H” refer to “Hortense” but now it also indicates that reading this poem is, in fact, a question of time. The letter “H” has been used as an abbreviation for time for centuries, dating back before the French “heure” to its use as an abbreviation for “hora” in Latin:

126

John Milton, The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and Harlow: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1968), 166. 127 605-07. For further comparisons between Blake and Rimbaud, see, among others, Ahearn, “Blake, Rimbaud, Marx: D’‘Après le déluge’ à ‘Soir historique’”; Peschel, “Themes of Rebellion in William Blake and Rimbaud”; and Thines (see bibliography).

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comme abréviation, H, chez les Latins, se mettait pour habet, il a; hic, ici; hic, celui-ci; et pour tous les autres cas et genres de ce pronom, fréquemment employé dans les inscriptions tumulaires; hastatus, soldat armé d’une lance; haeres, héritier; homo, homme; honor, honneur; hora, heure; hostis, ennemi; herus, maître.128 [as abbreviation, H, for the Romans, was used for habet, he has; hic, here; hic, this one; and for all the other cases and genders of this pronoun, frequently used in burial inscriptions: hastatus, soldier armed with a lance; haeres, inheritor; homo, man; honor, honor; hora, hour; hostis, enemy; herus, master.]

Just a few of the many examples of the abbreviation being used well before Rimbaud include Henri Frédéric Amiel’s journal from 1866: “Éveillé dès 2 heures de la nuit, debout dès 4h30 du matin” [Awake starting at 2 o’clock in the morning, up starting at 4h30 in the morning] with numerous other sources in both French and English from the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.129 Finally, there are other terms surrounding this “H” that are useful, incorporating both the notion of time in the title “H” and this interpretation of “Hortense” as “hors-tense”: l’horloge. In fact, the figure of the horloge presents the paradox of the personified Hortense, of “H”: L’ensemble de toute machine destinée à la mesure du temps se compose de deux parties distinctes: l’une, le rouage, qui, ainsi que son nom l’indique, est formée par une succession de roues, ou train d’engrenages, dont la fonction est de transmettre, en un point donné, une force motrice produit par un poids ou un ressort; l’autre, qu’on nomme l’échappement, est une espèce de mécanisme particulier adapté à la fin du train d’engrenages afin d’en modérer le mouvement trop rapide et de régulariser l’écoulement de la force motrice, qui, grâce à cet artifice mécanique, ne se dépense qu’avec la lenteur et l’uniformité voulues.130 [The entirety of all machine destined to the measure of time is made up of two distinct parts: one, the cogwheel, which, as its name suggests, is formed by a succession of wheels, or train of gears, whose function is to transmit, in a given

128

Larousse, s.v. “H.” Larousse also uses the abbreviation “H” many times in the definition of the word “heure”: “Cela posé, soient h et h1 les heures marquées par l’horloge aux instants des deux observations, et H l’heure inconnu qu’elle marquait à midi vrai [...]” [That said, let h and h1 be the hours of the clock in instants for the two observations, and H the unknown hour that it marked at true noon] (s.v. “Heure”). 129 359; See also: Livret-Chaix (Paris: Napoléon Chaix, 1847), 8 and back cover; and Wilson’s A Treatise on English Punctuation (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1862), perhaps the most succinct: “H. or h. – Hour, hours” (285). 130 Claudius Saunier, Traité d’horlogerie moderne: Théorie et pratique (Paris: Bureau de la Revue Chronométrique, 1869), 1.

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point, a moving force produced by a weight or a spring; the other, which is called the escapement, is a type of particular mechanism adapted to the end of gear trains in order to moderate the rapid movement and to regularize the flow of the motorized force, which, thanks to this mechanic artifice, is only released with the desired slowness and uniformity.]

The two major elements of this definition closely follow the present reading of this poem: first, the rouage, the source of the cyclical motion that, as has been shown, is evident in the movement from “H” to “Hortense” and back. Second, the word échappement contains the inherent tension that makes this poem tick: “1º Action d’échapper, de sortir avec violence [...]. 2º Terme de mécanique et d’horlogerie. Mécanisme qui sert à modérer, à régulariser le mouvement” [1º Action of escaping, of leaving violently [...]. 2º Term of mechanics and clockmaking. Mechanism that serves to moderate, to regularize movement].131 This term’s importance in clockmaking cannot be overstated, as Larousse’s definition shows: L’échappement des montres et des pendules en est la partie la plus importante et la plus délicate, et l’on peut dire que, suivant la manière dont il est conçu et suivant qu’il est plus ou moins bien exécuté, la machine sera bonne ou mauvaise, la parfaite exécution des autres pièces n’étant, pour ainsi dire, que d’un intérêt secondaire.132 [The escapement of watches and clocks is the most important and most delicate part, and one can even state that, following the manner in which it is conceived and well or poorly executed, the machine will be good or bad, the perfect execution of the other pieces being, in other words, of a secondary importance.]

Curiously, the échappement denotes both the attempt to escape and the restriction, albeit in moderation, of movement. This tension between restriction and escaping that very restriction seems most evident in that most nineteenth-century of inventions: railway travel. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch explains, rail travel disrupted space and time in a manner not unlike what Rimbaud’s poetry did: troubling common perceptions and disorienting the passengers (or, in poetry, the lyric subject, not to mention the readers) in the process. For Schivelbusch, this process was a double-edged sword:

131 132

Littré, s.v. “Échappement.” Larousse, s.v. “Échappement.”

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[…] the idea that the railroad annihilated space and time must be seen as the reaction of perceptive powers that, formed by a certain transport technology, find suddenly that technology has been replaced by an entirely new one. Compared to the geotechnical space-time relationship, the one created by the railroad appears abstract and disorientating, because the railroad – in realizing Newton’s mechanics – negated all that characterized neotechnical traffic; the railroad did not appear embedded in the space of the landscape the way coach and highway are, but seemed to strike its way through it. […] on one hand, the railroad opened up new spaces that were not as easily accessible before; on the other, it did so by destroying space, namely the space between points.133

This disturbing feeling was evoked by Heinrich Heine in 1843 on the occasion of “an enormous, an unheard-of event whose consequences are imponderable and incalculable [… and] which swings mankind in a new direction, and changes the color and shape of life”: the opening of new railway lines from Paris to Rouen and Orléans: “What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone.”134 In terms of the personification of Hortense in “H,” then, the search in this poem starts with an escape from mechanisms that measure time, and all the while the escape is all too aware of the mechanisms’ importance. Once again, there is a search for a moment in time that is not, a moment that is not within but rather outside of the restrictions and tensions related to time: “hors-tense.” What are the “monstruosités” that violate Hortense’s atrocious gestures? Working backwards in this sentence, it becomes clearer; for Hortense, the regimented nature of time is monstrous, violating every aspect of her life, not allowing her a moment without being timed, and thus controlled. In her desire to escape the confines of time, Hortense’s “gestes atroces” push the limits of time. But once she is aware of the domination of time, Hortense’s every act is subversive. Hortense’s trials and tribulations continue, and the phrase, “Sa solitude est 133

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 37. For more information, see David F. Bell’s excellent study on the impact of technology (from communication and transportation) on representations of notions of space and time in nineteenth-century French prose: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola (Champaign/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 134 Qtd. in Schivelbusch 37.

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la mécanique érotique, sa lassitude, la dynamique amoureuse” shows her attempts at escaping the firm grip of time. On the one hand, the two parts of the sentence begin with very personal states: solitude and lassitude. The second part of each pair, beginning with a definite article, involves a more general, even global, state. Lawler is probably right that the “mechanics” of this poem on one level “may denote masturbation – in any case, a customary habit which contrasts with artistic construction.”135 In Littré’s second definition of “mécanique,” “Arrangement naturel ou artificiel des corps” [natural or artificial arrangement of bodies], the emphasis is placed on “les effets qui sont produits” [the results that are produced]; it is also worth noting the two examples that Littré gives: “La mécanique du corps humain. La mécanique d’une montre” [The mechanics of the human body. The mechanics of a watch].136 When Hortense is alone, then, there is nothing but the mechanics of time, the tick-tock of the clocks surrounding her; less constricted modes of time, such as lassitude, offer endless possibilities of love. In a sense, Baudelaire prefigures this search for more flexible moments in time in his prose poem “L’horloge,” in which the subject states: [J]e vois toujours l’heure distinctement, toujours la même, une heure vaste, solennelle, grande comme l’espace, sans divisions de minutes ni de secondes, – une heure immobile qui n’est pas marquée sur les horloges, et cependant légère comme un soupir, rapide comme un coup d’œil.137 [I always see time distinctly, always the same, a vast and solemn hour, large like space, without divisions of minutes or seconds, – an immobile hour that is not marked on clocks, and nevertheless light like a sigh, quick as a wink.]

“Sous la surveillance d’une enfance elle a été, à des époques nombreuses, l’ardente hygiène des races” begins the juxtaposition of tenses in which Hortense is viewed, at different times and in different temporal settings, trying to attain a state of extra-temporality. (It is perhaps useful to remember that, from its opening in “Après le déluge,” Illuminations begins with an “afterwards,” a time that is already after another equally unspecified time.) First, the past: the 135

James Lawler, Rimbaud’s Theater of the Self (Cambrdge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 98. 136 Littré, s.v. “Mécanique.” 137 Baudelaire 1:299-300.

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reader is ushered from a particular, personal past (denoted by the use of “la,” “une,” and “elle”) to a historical, generalized one (marked by the plurals “des époques nombreuses” and “des races”). Hortense’s desire to move beyond the limits of time continues on to the present in the next sentences, beginning with “Sa porte est ouverte à la misère.” This return to the present is emphasized not only by the word “actuels” but also by the use of the neologism “se décorporer.” As he does in “Le cœur volé” and elsewhere, Rimbaud invents new words when the body is at its most important; here in “H,” the corporal experience is explicitly “autre,” so much so that there are no existing words that can describe it. Furthermore, this shedding of corporality is the poem’s strongest example of Rimbaud’s statement from Une saison en enfer that “L’amour est à réinventer, on le sait” [Love is to be reinvented, that is clear] (103). Instead of a modern, “actuel” conception of beings and their morality, Rimbaud moves beyond the limits of comprehension, using unknown words and tearing apart that which readers are most sure of: their bodies, at the present moment. This, then, is as much an affront to the cogito of “Je pense, donc je suis” as is Rimbaud’s famous line “Je est un autre.” If the words at the end of the sentence, “passion” and “action” have a new ring to them, it is because they are new, brand-new, experienced for the first time “Hors-tense,” beyond questions of actual lives; as a result, this sentence is reminiscent of another of the Illuminations, “Départ”: Assez vu. La vision s’est rencontrée à tous les airs. Assez eu. Rumeurs des villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours. Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. — Ô Rumeurs et Visions! Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs! (129) [Seen enough. The vision met itself in every kind of air. Had enough. Noises of cities in the evening, in the sunlight, and forever. Known enough. The haltings of life. – Oh! Noises and Visions! Departure into new affection and sound!]

The door that is “ouverte à la misère” has been opened inward, and the erotic and amorous states of “Hors-tense,” available through Rimbaud’s feminine personification, are “out there,” beyond the four walls of human existence. This description of the woman as a personification of an “other” state can be interpreted as yet another direct response to the Parnassian model; nevertheless, it is important to note

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that this response is quite different from much of Rimbaud’s earlier verse poems, as this study has already discussed. The line “Ô terrible frisson des amours novices sur le sol sanglant et par l’hydrogène clarteux!” offers an example of a new state that exists beyond temporality; the newness of the experience is evident in the “amours novices.” In addition, the elements of what Riffaterre called “significance textuelle” when speaking about “Barbare” are equally rich: the alliteration of the sounds [s] and [r] is so prevalent that it creates a pattern, and therefore a new state of time, all its own. Furthermore, the somewhat surreal “paysage immonde” [filthy place]138 evoked here is the backdrop for this grammatical “monstruosité,” this sentence without a verb. According to Benveniste, the verb is “l’élément indispensable à la constitution d’un énoncé assertif fini” [the indispensable element in the constitution of a finite assertive utterance]; 139 as a result, this verb-less sentence is not “fini”; in other words, it is “in-fini.” The timeless action in this sentence comes not from verbs, not from subjects acting upon objects in the traditional model, but as it is suggested by nouns, in particular “frisson” and “amours.” Since, for Benveniste, “[...] le domaine de la subjectivité s’agrandit encore et doit s’annexer l’expression de la temporalité” [the domain of subjectivity grows more still and has to incorporate the expression of temporality] and “le langage est donc la possibilité de la subjectivité” [language is thus the possibility of subjectivity],140 the grammatical lack of verb in this sentence reveals a greater lack, a growing lack in this sentence, in the poem, and in the Illuminations. Without a verb, this sentence reveals the lack of subject in the description of Hortense and in all of “H.” Insofar as it is a way to transcend both time and, as a result, subjectivity, this “phase in-finie” is just one example of Rimbaud’s poésie objective as he describes it in his Lettres du voyant. In “trouvez Hortense,” the reader is brought back to the beginning in two ways: first, this phrase returns the reader to the beginning by completing the circle, returning to “Hortense” and thus back to the title and the beginning. Secondly, the return to the present tense is evident in the imperative, and so the reader is brought back from the 138

This phrase is borrowed from “Démocratie” in Illuminations (153). Benveniste 1:154. 140 Benveniste 1:262 and 263, respectively. 139

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“guided tour,” both throughout history and with an eye toward a future state, to the present tense. But this present is not the same present as the beginning; the imperative of this last sentence implies a future quest – that is, a hint of another state still to come – but it is also not the general present in the first sentence (“Toutes les monstruosités violent les gestes atroces d’Hortense”), but rather the very specific present of the moment of reading. It is clear, then, that the end of the poem is just the beginning, as it immediately refers the reader elsewhere, perhaps “hors-tense,” and sets deeper tasks of reading into motion. As Osmond notes, this last sentence “conveys the idea that there is a riddle, that is, that there is something beyond any meaning that can be immediately grasped. But it is also an injunction that we should discover in our own lives how to attain this transcendent experience. Thus the words are there to reveal a new mode of feeling [...].”141 In addition to privileging the letter “H” as the abbreviation for time, this interpretation shows Hortense’s desire to transcend constraints of time. Instead of simply sending the reader back to the beginning of the circle created by “H” and “Hortense,” “trouvez Hortense” sends the reader beyond the poem and the page, beyond the moment of reading and beyond traditional notions of time. In this respect, the “nouveau corps amoureux” that appears in “H” exists beyond the reader’s understanding of time and space, and by extension beyond all laws that govern traditional forms of subjectivity, and all existence.

Mouvement In this discussion of disrupted notions of time and space in Illuminations, it is crucial to consider “Mouvement” (152), the remarkable poem that, with “Marine,” marks the beginning of French free-verse poetry. The all too neat categories “verse,” “prose,” and “free verse,” are mere editorial conventions, more problematic than helpful since, starting in 1872, Rimbaud wrote poems in all three categories, 141

Nick Osmond, Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations (London: The Athlone PressUniversity of London, 1976), 155.

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sometimes straddling several at once. Rather than try to reestablish the boundaries between traditional categories, our discussion of “Mouvement” concurs with recent poetic criticism, and agrees with Michel Murat, among others: “Si l’on veut établir une limite, ce ne peut être qu’entre les poèmes en vers et les poèmes sans vers. C’est une frontière arbitraire parce qu’institutionnelle: elle oblige à prendre parti” [If we want to draw a line, it could only be between poems in verse and poems without verse. It’s a distinction that is arbitrary because it is institutional; it requires one to choose sides].142 For the dizzying universe within which it traces human presence, all played out amid a clean break from all conventions of versification, this poem “inaugure la modernité” [inaugurates modernity].143 Beginning with the title, it is clear that this poem marks a stark contrast from what has already been discussed as a cornerstone of Parnassian poetics: Rimbaud’s “Mouvement” is the counterpoint to Parnassian immobility, in its refusal of classical versification – the poetic form moving away from the neo-classical model – and the static positions into which the Parnassian players are most often placed. As was the case in “Âge d’or,” the lack of (definite or indefinite) article in the title “Mouvement” is a point worth noting; unlike the definite article in the poem’s first verse, the unattached movement of the title serves to underscore the flow that courses through the poem. Rather than being fixed or limited in any way, here the notion of movement is presented not as “a/one/the movement” but in a limitless, an unquantifiable fashion, in the purest possible sense and on the largest possible scope. Here, then, the accent is on the action in progress. Of course, movement that surrounds the lyric carries with it enormous consequences for the subject, potentially shaking down to its very core. Within the conventional understanding of time and space, movement in the most traditional sense is always a question of movement in time and in space. As we have already noted in the above discussion of “Mémoire,” one can never enter the same river twice; similarly, the slightest movement implies an irrevocable displacement in time and space. However, Rimbaud’s poems begin to defy traditional temporal and spatial existence; what can be said, then, 142

Murat, “À propos de ‘Mouvement’” 72; even this distinction, however, is not particularly useful to the present study, and so it will not be pursued further here. 143 Bobillot, “Rimbaud et le vers libre” 216.

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of a poem that is based on movement through these axes? In other words, if disjointed time and space result in disjointed lyric subject, then what of the movement of that subject in displaced time and space?144 For starters, “Mouvement” is not a breakthrough in poetic form simply for form’s sake; here a new vehicle is required to relay accurately the new situation of the lyric. The situation of the lyric subject and the form used to describe it are inextricably intertwined; in this respect, it is useful to recall our earlier discussion of the passage from Rimbaud’s lettre du voyant of 15 May 1871, in which he states, “Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu […] si ce qu’il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme: si c’est informe, il donne de l’informe” (253). When Rimbaud later in the same letter succinctly referred to this connection in the lyric as one between “idées et formes,” he prefigured Käte Hamburger’s important work, which would lead to the conclusion that “In the lyric poem form and meaning are identical.”145 Generally speaking, in this regard conventional time would be the traditional rhythm and meter (functions of beats, speed, fluidity, etc.) that flow through a poem, represented best in French poetry by the alexandrine twelve-beat line but more generally by verses of even-numbered syllables. A famous example of what could be considered an unconventional notion of time in poetry would be Verlaine’s poem “Art poétique,” from Jadis et Naguère, which begins: De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l’Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air, Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose. (ŒP 326) [Music before all else, And for that prefer the Odd More vague and soluble in air, Without anything in it that weighs or poses.] 144

Excellent studies of this poem that go beyond the questions of the lyric in time and space include Michel Murat, “À propos de ‘Mouvement’,” and Charles D. Minahen, Vortex/t, especially his chapter 8, “‘Tourbillons de lumière’: Rimbaud’s Illuminating Vortices” (115-28). 145 Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 249.

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To be sure, Rimbaud’s departure in “Mouvement” from any recognizable temporal poetic markers is more audacious than verses of oddnumbered syllables, already popularized by Marceline DesbordesValmore earlier in the century and then, later, by Verlaine. As a result, we see in the first part of “Mouvement” that the subjects are entirely dominated by the forces – the movement – around them (“entourés”) to the point of their near submersion or disappearance: Le mouvement de lacet sur la berge des chutes du fleuve, Le gouffre à l’étambot, La célérité de la rampe, L’énorme passade du courant Mènent par les lumières inouïes Et la nouveauté chimique Les voyageurs entourés des trombes du val Et du strom. [The swaying motion on the bank of the river falls, The chasm at the sternpost, The swiftness of the hand-rail, The huge passing of the current Conduct by unimaginable lights And chemical newness Voyagers surrounded by the waterspouts of the valley And the current.]

Appearing only in the seventh line of this eight-line first part, the subjects’ arrival is delayed by the list of phrases detailing the multilayered movement of which they are merely pawns, like objects carried through a tornado. What’s more, their helplessness is emphasized by the fact that they are moved by forces that that were previously unknown to them: “les lumières inouïes / Et la nouveauté chimique.” In addition to the new science, recalling the “science” coupled with “patience” in “Patience” and “L’Éternité,” there is the synesthesia of the visual “lumières” that are not unseen but rather unheard of: “inouïes.” Furthermore, both forces suggest knowledge, “lumières” in the broadest sense and “chimique” as that specific branch of science that explains the most fundamental aspects of the elements of existence. As the voyagers are presented, they are overwhelmed by this new information, led through it all and surrounded by it but they do not fully grasp it; the prepositional phrase of this

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knowledge (beginning with “par”) removes them even further from the action of the sentence (“Mènent”) and relegates their role to as minor a position as possible, all but annihilated. After the mention of the voyagers, the list of movement continues, to the end of this first part, closing the sentence and the tableau with a final line that, almost as an afterthought, leaves the impression that even more items can be added to the list, like an ellipse. Oddly enough, despite its preponderance of words designating movement (“mouvement,” “lacet,” “chutes,” “fleuve,” “gouffre,” “célérité,” “rampe”), the beginning of the poem fails to present the very means of that travel: “Malgré l’usage constant de l’article défini, le Vaisseau reste fantôme. Il est évoqué par son seul mouvement” [Despite the constant use of the definite article, the Vessel remains a phantom. It is evoked only by its movement].146 As was suggested in the discussion of the poem’s title, the movement itself dominates the entire first part of the poem, yielding to more information about the subjects and their situation, their means of travel, in the second part: Ce sont les conquérants du monde Cherchant la fortune chimique personnelle; Le sport et le comfort voyagent avec eux; Ils emmènent l’éducation Des races, des classes et des bêtes, sur ce Vaisseau. Repos et vertige À la lumière diluvienne, Aux terribles soirs d’étude. [They are the conquerors of the world Seeking a personal chemical fortune; Sports and comfort travel with them; They take the education Of races, classes, and animals, on this Boat. Repose and dizziness To the torrential light, To the terrible nights of study.]

The opening “Ce sont” details the voyageurs, asserting a version of the Cartesian cogito and suggesting a more thorough description of these passengers, their mode of transportation, and their voyage. And yet, rather than the unequivocal “je suis,” the words “Ce sont” keep 146

Brunel, Éclats de la violence 713.

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human presence in “Mouvement” vague: in the generalized plural and anonymous. As a result, their identity is not as important as all that results of their being carried by the movement: their direction, their orientation, their speed, what they bring with them, and what they leave behind. These world travelers – underscored by the use of the English-derived “sport” and “comfort” as well as the notion of them being “conquérants,” thus traveling a significant distance – fall right in line with the cliché of colonizers: seeking individual fortune and bringing with them leisure, comfort, and the education of races, classes, and animals. The repetition of the word “chimique” is important, as it highlights the omnipresence of knowledge, focused here on an individual’s possession of that knowledge. The boat is stretched to hyperbolic limits, both by its capitalization (“ce Vaisseau”) and by its position, sticking out at the end of the longest line of this section of the poem. This dramatic presence recalls the biblical Ark and the enormous consequences of this movement for all of humanity, reminding us of “Après le Déluge” also from Illuminations, which opens: “Aussitôt que l’idée du Déluge se fut rassise” [As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided] (121). The second short sentence in this section shows the conflict in the human presence set up in the first five lines as it sets up the chiasmus of the last two lines, pairing “lumière” with “soirs d’étude” (both signifying knowledge) and “diluvienne” with “terribles.” Furthermore, “Repos et vertige” seem to be contradictory phases of the poem’s movement: one a state of rest (more precisely, lack of movement), the other a chaotic and even frightening motion. Such, then, is the stop-and-go movement of this voyage towards enlightenment: rough and choppy, rather than fluid. Once again, the parallel between this voyage and the poetic form used to depict it is obvious: such an irregular rhythm would be ill served by an alexandrine, and the freed form Rimbaud uses in “Mouvement” allows for lines and sentences that vary in length along with the varying movement of the poem’s voyage. Lastly, this part of the poem’s second section is a grammatical anomaly: a sentence lacking a verb, recalling the similar sentence discussed above from “H.” Once again, plenty of action is packed into nouns (“Repos,” “vertige,” “étude”), all surrounding the one of the poem’s few time periods (“soirs,” again in the generalized plural), but the voyagers get lost in the shuffle; as in the first section they are mere

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particles that are picked up and subjected to the movement in the poem. Such is what is left for the lyric subject here: the enormity of movement of time and space leaves precious little significance for any human presence; despite literature’s traditional focus on the human experience, Rimbaud stretches beyond in “Mouvement,” to the ends of the earth, consequently reducing the position of the lyric (already problematized in poems from 1872) to nothing but a speck of dust in the cosmic poetic universe of Illuminations. Such emphasis on the enormity of space and its consequences for the lyric subject is also evident in “Vies III,” in which Rimbaud’s sequence of prepositional phrases explodes the space surrounding the subject, “rocketing to a point [...] of having gone beyond mundane experience”:147 Dans un grenier où je fus enfermé à douze ans j’ai connu le monde, j’ai illustré la comédie humaine. Dans un cellier j’ai appris l’histoire. À quelque fête de nuit dans une cité du Nord j’ai rencontré toutes les femmes des anciens peintres. Dans un vieux passage à Paris on m’a enseigné les sciences classiques. Dans une magnifique demeure cernée par l’Orient entier j’ai accompli mon immense œuvre et passé mon illustre retraite. J’ai brassé mon sang. Mon devoir m’est remis. Il ne faut même plus songer à cela. Je suis réellement d’outre-tombe, et pas de commissions. (129) [In an attic where at the age of twelve I was locked up, I knew the world and illustrated the human comedy. In a wine cellar I learned history. At some night celebration, in a northern city, I met all the wives of former painters. In an old back street in Paris I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent palace, surrounded by all the Orient, I finished my long work and spent my celebrated retirement. I have invigorated my blood. I am released from my duty. I must not even think of that any longer. I am really from beyond the tomb, and without work.]

Notable features of this second section – textual irregularities and an infinitesimal role for the lyric – continue, and are rendered more apparent, in the third section of “Mouvement”: Car de la causerie parmi les appareils, – le sang; les fleurs, le feu, les bijoux – Des comptes agités à ce bord fuyard, – On voit, roulant comme une digue au delà de la route hydraulique motrice, Monstrueux, s’éclairant sans fin, – leur stock d’études; – Eux chassés dans l’extase harmonique Et l’héroïsme de la découverte. 147

Little, Rimbaud, Illuminations 47.

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[For from the talk among the apparatus, – blood, flowers, fire, jewels – From the agitated accounts on this fleeing deck, – You can see, rolling like a dyke beyond the hydraulic motor road, Monstrous, illuminated endlessly, – their stock of studies; And the heroism of discovery.]

If the second section touched on the “who” of the poem, this third section begins with “why,” opening with the explanatory “Car.” The subjects’ lack of importance is underscored by their attempts at communication being reduced to “de la causerie,” their speech described as “des comptes agités,” and their passive role in this scene: “chassés,” being driven rather than forging ahead. This third part is also interesting, among many reasons because it contains the two formal aspects that define this poem: the length of each line and the explosive speed with which Rimbaud’s poetic language flies across the page.148 Whereas the lines in the first section were almost all short, this section of “Mouvement” begins with lines that are more than double the length – in words and in syllables – of many of the lines in the first section: Car de la causerie parmi les appareils, – le sang; les fleurs, le feu, les bijoux – Des comptes agités à ce bord fuyard, – On voit, roulant comme une digue au delà de la route hydraulique motrice,

Most modern editions allow the first and third lines above to continue over to an extra line; Pierre Brunel’s excellent “Pochothèque” edition presents the lines as follows: Car de la causerie parmi les appareils, – le sang, les fleurs, le feu, les bijoux, – Des comptes agités à ce bord fuyard, On voit, roulant comme une digue au delà de la route hydraulique motrice:149

while in his Éclats de la violence, the same lines read:

148

For questions relating to this poem’s manuscript, see Guyaux, Poétique du fragment 290; and Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed Murphy 4:448. 149 Brunel, ed., 504.

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Car de la causerie parmi les appareils, – le sang; les fleurs, le feu, les bijoux – Des comptes agités à ce bord fuyard, – On voit, roulant comme une digue au delà de la route hydraulique motrice,150

This is not to single out Brunel, for his excellent editions are in good company in this regard151; nevertheless, neither layout above accurately reproduces Rimbaud’s insistence, evident in the tiny scribbling on the page’s right margins even when there was plenty of room to continue on the next line below, that the lines not continue beyond the right margin of the page. A more faithful rendering of Rimbaud’s manuscript would retain the poet’s markings – “les bijoux” suspended above “le feu” and “motrice” above “hydraulique” – and the first and third lines would look something like this: les bijoux – Car de la causerie parmi les appareils, – le sang; les fleurs, le feu,

and motrice, – On voit, roulant comme une digue au delà de la route hydraulique152

Rimbaud’s insistence in these line extensions is not at all unique, but it does point to one crucial detail of “Mouvement”: that this is a poem in verse, not in prose. (Whereas prose would not hesitate to continue a paragraph and continue to the next line, one of the specific features of verse poetry is that, since each verse represents a single unit of language as well as of thought, a given verse rarely exceeds the page’s right margin.) This choppy rhythm – unlike the more fluid prose – is enhanced by the sudden abundance of punctuation, almost entirely absent in the first two sections of the poem. Through this additional 150

Brunel, Éclats de la violence, 705. Nor is the point of these citations to bring attention to the editorial inconsistencies between these two editions; again, Brunel is hardly alone in this, and the only safeguard against such errors is to return always to the original manuscripts; it is for this reason that the fourth volume of Murphy’s Œuvres complètes is so important, as are the companion volumes that detail the minutiae on every manuscript. 152 The line that runs to the left of and above the word “motrice” is in Rimbaud’s hand. 151

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attack against more traditional poetic time and space, even the long lines in this part are cut up into smaller pieces, and so this poem is cut up into a series of pieces, lacking the flow of traditional prose. The movement through the versification of this poem, then, is a movement through verse poetry; unlike the fluidity of prose, each verse in “Mouvement” explodes onto the page and disappears just as quickly, as the next line takes the stage. The other aspect worth noting is the change, visible on the manuscript, in the third sentence; Rimbaud shortened the lines that once read: Monstrueux, s’éclairant sans fin, – le stock d’études Qui est le leur, – eux chassés dans l’extase harmonique

to, in their final version: Monstrueux, s’éclairant sans fin, – leur stock d’études; – Eux chassés dans l’extase harmonique

To be sure, this is not the first time that a writer chose to render a possessive more succinctly with an adjective (“leur stock”) than with a relative clause (“Qui est le leur”). However, it is clear that the end result is the same: such a change unquestionably speeds up the flow of language, as well as removes four syllables (“Qui est le leur”) from the second of the two verses in question. This quickening of the tempo is consistent with the other feature in this third section of “Mouvement,” both working together to disrupt the normal flow of poetic language and make this poem a series of staccato blows. In the happenings of the poem’s final section (“accidents” originally from the Latin accidere, to happen), the modifier “atmosphériques” recalls the earlier discussion of this poem’s ability to reach the farthest ends of space, of its cosmic, galactic scope: Aux accidents atmosphériques les plus surprenants Un couple de jeunesse s’isole sur l’arche – Est-ce ancienne sauvagerie qu’on pardonne? – Et chante et se poste. [In the most startling atmospheric happenings A youthful couple withdraws into the archway, – Is it an ancient coyness that can be forgiven? – And sings and stands guard.]

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Rimbaud again relegates the human presence to a secondary role, by the size (“atmosphériques”) and hyperbole (“les plus surprenants”) of the space in which it is situated and in its less than initial position in the sentence: after an opening prepositional phrase. In addition, the notion of the individual is once again problematic, presented as one of a couple; despite the singular terms surrounding it – the indefinite article “un” and verbs “s’isole,” “chante,” and “se poste” – identity is once again blurred in this poem of temporal and spatial movement, here lost in the sacrifice to the couple. The notion of a couple isolated on an arch certainly bears echoes of the biblical Ark, already hinted at in the poem’s second section: two by two, a pair of youths are isolated (from the flood suggested by the “lumière diluvienne”); and yet, this couple’s very role in this last section is rendered unclear almost as soon as it is mentioned. The following line bears a question, but its source muddies the waters: who is asking whom? It could be the two members of the couple, speaking as one; in this reading, the dash at the beginning of the line is the kind used to introduce dialogue. On the other hand, the dash at the end of the line closes this question off from the rest of the section, as a parenthetical statement; in this case, perhaps Rimbaud is addressing the reader. Certainly, both possibilities are present in this ambiguity; in the former, the members of the couple ask each other about the ancient coyness of the world they are leaving behind, looking for forgiveness as they look ahead. In the latter, several possibilities coexist, stemming from the ambiguousness of the “ancienne sauvagerie.” On the one hand, Rimbaud is asking us about the couple’s coyness: can such a timid behavior be forgiven? Also, how can the lyric voice exist beyond the former existence he has so deeply troubled via the movement of the poem? Rimbaud is simultaneously asking us about the coyness of the ancient mode of poetry that he has just obliterated here, recalling his sentiments on “la poésie subjective” from his letter to Izambard on 13 May 1871: “Au fond, vous ne voyez en votre principe que poésie subjective [...] votre poésie subjective sera toujours horriblement fadasse.” The answer to this question comes in the last lines of the poem, in the resulting stance for the forward-looking couple: to continue in poetry (“chante”) while being on guard (“se poste”). That “Mouvement” ends in a song speaks to a somewhat hopeful future for linguistic expres-

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sion in general and poetry in particular. This remaining song recalls “Barbare,” in which the poem’s silence is interrupted, at the end of the poem, by the appearance of a human voice: “[...] et la voix féminine arrivée au fond des volcans et des grottes arctiques.” Similarly, it echoes the continuation of Rimbaud’s letter to Izambard: “Un jour, j’espère, – bien d’autres espèrent la même chose, – je verrai dans votre principe la poésie objective, je la verrai plus sincèrement que vous ne le feriez!” And so it goes with Rimbaud’s impact on French poetry: rendering traditional notions of time and space useless, he arrives at the goal set out for himself in the lettres du voyant. Past forms of expression (be they verse poetry, or perhaps Rimbaud’s term “poésie subjective”) are insufficient in describing the lyric in a poetic universe with problematized temporal and spatial axes. As “Mouvement” shows us, all is in flux, the lyric is reduced to the smallest of roles, and the stuff of poetry will forever be more interested in the objects and context surrounding the lyric subject than the subject itself. Returning to “À une Raison,” the poem from Illuminations quoted at the beginning of this chapter, we see that human presence practically disappears against the enormous backdrop of eternity and infinity, new Rimbaldian modes of time and space: “Arrivée de toujours, qui t’en iras partout” [You will go everywhere, since you have come from all time]. Whatever form of poetry remains is left as an open-ended question, perhaps to be answered by generations of poets after Rimbaud who must create a new poetics just as Rimbaud’s creations pushed versification to its limits in poetry without verse in “Marine” and “Mouvement.” As Rimbaud wrote to Demeny about “l’avenir de la poésie” [the future of poetry]: “En attendant, demandons aux poètes du nouveau, – idées et formes” [Meanwhile, let us ask the poets for the new – ideas and forms] (252-53).

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Conclusion

In focusing on Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s respective responses to Parnassian poetry, this study allows us to consider both poets’ work in a new light. Jean-Paul Goujon’s interesting work on the fourth volume of Parnassian poetry marked the beginning of a reevaluation of the role le Parnasse played between Romanticism and Symbolism. Projected for 1892 or 1893, serious discussions for producing a fourth volume of Le Parnasse contemporain show the extent to which, rather than a passing ephemeral trend, the neoclassical Parnassian approach remained relevant after the official birth of the Symbolist movement. Furthermore, as I have argued, le Parnasse must now be considered not only for the duration of its existence but also for its importance at the height of its popularity, in the 1860s and 1870s. By extension, the traditional view of nineteenth-century French poetry requires a new look: instead of treating the century as bearing two dominant schools with a brief amorphous interlude between them, an increased importance attributed to le Parnasse should by extension give scholars cause to reconsider Romanticism and Symbolism as they fit in the newly reapportioned field of nineteenth-century French poetry. The large majority of contributors to le Parnasse contemporain receive little critical attention, and studies of the canonical writers who participated in the review treat their Parnassian poems almost as curiosa; future studies of Parnassian poetry can offer new insight into the participation of all poets – young, old, “major” and “minor,” male and female – to reconsider their inclusion in and, perhaps, debt to the major presence in French poetry of the 1860s and 1870s. Poems by Rimbaud and Verlaine have enjoyed much critical attention over the last century, and it is hoped that the present study will answer some questions about certain aspects of their work and, just as important, raise new questions for scholars to consider in the future. It is my most sincere hope that the critical attention to devoted to Verlaine’s work will continue to grow; his poetry has never been

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studied as much as Rimbaud’s, despite its richness, breadth, and seeming contradictions. Recent work in Verlaine studies has been most promising1, and scholars’ respectful treatment of his poetic work without facile conclusions based on his fascinating biography is particularly reassuring. Studies on the crisis of the lyric subject have most often focused on the poets most often considered to be more intellectual, including Rimbaud and Mallarmé; despite Verlaine’s own claim regarding his poem “Art poétique” that “je n’aurai pas fait de théorie” [I shall not have created any theory] (ŒP 1074), his work is certainly deserving of more rigorous study, particularly of the multiple stances of the lyric subject throughout his career. Without the specter of his tantalizing biography – forcing one’s critical hand or dominating like the proverbial elephant in a room – Verlaine’s poetry is elevated to the levels of his most highly regarded contemporaries, treated with the serious scholarship it deserves. Hopefully this reflection on the status of the lyric in Verlaine’s work will lead to further analyses of individual collections and poems: before, during, and after the Parnassian era of the nineteenth century. Rimbaud’s work has been considered with respect to time and space, but it is always limited to the prose poems of Illuminations and without that inquiry tied to the crisis in the lyric subject, famously described in his Lettres du voyant. While they represent an exceptional achievement in French literature, Illuminations should not be isolated from the rest of Rimbaud’s work. In this regard my study follows the most recent trends in the critical editions of Rimbaud’s poetry, inspired by the recent “genetic criticism” that has put increasing importance on the creative process that leads to a literary work. This approach looks closely at early stages of poems and compares them to each other and to the last known version in the poet’s hand, resulting in greater knowledge in approximating dates of undated versions of individual poems. By extension, a writer’s work is considered more as an organic development than as a series of productions that can be neatly date- and time-stamped and organized. For Rimbaud criticism, this notion of an organic work is particularly useful, especially since his career was so short, and it has allowed my study of the lyric subject in crisis, across the axes of time and space, 1

Some of the best work has come from the scholarly journal, Revue Verlaine, founded in 1993.

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to consider the poems from Illuminations as the apotheosis of a process that extends throughout Rimbaud’s entire poetic project. A fresh look at le Parnasse gives us a new vantage point from which to consider all French poetry of the nineteenth century. Looking forward, it helps us consider Symbolism – which set the table for so much of the twentieth century – in a new way. The chapters devoted to Verlaine and Rimbaud have begun this process for these two poets, and plenty more remains to be done, on their poems as well as on those of their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.

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David-Weill, Natalie. Rêve de pierre: La Quête de la femme chez Théophile Gautier. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1989. Decaunes, Luc, ed. La Poésie parnassienne: De Gautier à Rimbaud. Paris: Seghers, 1977. Dednam, Sabine. “Rimbaud: Poésie et musique dans les Lettres du voyant.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 89.2 (Mar.-Apr. 1989): 220-29. Delvaille, Bernard, ed. La Poésie symboliste. Paris: Seghers, 1971. Denommé, Robert F. The French Parnassian Poets. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline. Les Œuvres complètes de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 2 vols. Ed. Marc Bertrand. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1973, Dillman, Karin J. The Subject in Rimbaud: From Self to “Je”. Romance Languages and Literature 23. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Dubois, Jean, Henri Mitterand, and Albert Dauzat, Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français, Paris, Larousse, 1995 Dull, Olga Anna. “From Rabelais to the Avant-Garde. Wordplays and Parody in the Wall-Journal Le Mur.” The Spirit of Montmartre. Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905. Ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw. New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum/Rutgers University Press, 1996. 199-241. Eigeldinger, Marc. “Bannières de mai.” Le point vélique: Études sur Arthur Rimbaud et Germain Nouveau. Université de Neuchâtel, Actes du colloque des 27 et 28 mai 1983. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1986. ---. “L’inscription de l’œuvre plastique dans les récits de Gautier.” Théophile Gautier, l’art et l’artiste: Actes du colloque international. Vol. 2. Montpellier: Société Théophile Gautier, 1983. 297-309. Étiemble, ed. Arthur Rimbaud, Pages choisies. Paris: Librairie Larousse/Classiques Larousse, 1957. Felman, Shoshana. “‘Tu as bien fait de partir, Arthur Rimbaud’: Poésie et modernité.” Littérature 11 (October 1973): 3-21. Féral, Josette. “Antigone or The Irony of the Tribe.” Trans Alice Jardine and Tom Gora. Diacritics 8.3 (Fall 1978): 2-14.

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Fongaro, Antoine. De la lettre à l’esprit: Pour lire Illuminations. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Fowlie, Wallace. Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. France, Anatole. Le Temps 26 September 1886: 2-3. Gautier, Théophile. Émaux et camées. Ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch. Paris: Gallimard/Poésie, 1981. ---. Mademoiselle de Maupin. Ed. Adolphe Boschot. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1955. Giusto, Jean-Pierre. “Explication de ‘Mémoire’.” Études rimbaldiennes 3 (1972): 43-52. Goujon, Jean-Paul. “Le quatrième Parnasse contemporain.” Histoires littéraires 1.2 (April-June 2000): 25-34. Gouvard, Jean-Michel, and Steve Murphy, eds. Verlaine à la loupe: Colloque de Cérisy 11-18 juillet 1996. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000. Grimal, Pierre. Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963. Guiraud, Pierre. Dictionnaire érotique. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1993. Guyaux, André. Duplicités de Rimbaud. Paris: Champion, 1991. ---. Poétique du fragment: Essai sur les Illuminations de Rimbaud. Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière, 1985. ---. “Trente repliques à ‘Je est un autre,’ petite phrase.” Revue des sciences humaines 64.193 (Jan.-Mar. 1984): 39-43. Hamburger, Käte. The Logic of Literature. Trans. Marilynn J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Harkness, Nigel. “‘Ce marbre qui me monte jusqu’aux genoux’: Pétrification, mimésis et le mythe de Pygmalion dans Lélia (1833 et 1839).” George Sand et l’écriture expérimentale. Actes du colloque de Cérisy-la-Salle, juillet 2004. Ed. Brigitte Diaz and Isabelle Naginski. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2007. ---. “Resisting Realist Petrification in George Sand’s Lélia and Balzac’s Sarrasine.” French Studies 59.2 (April 2005): 159-72. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume II . Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

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Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. “The Letter of Lord Chandos.” Selected Prose. Trans. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern. New York: Pantheon, 1952. 129-41. Huret, Jules. Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire. 1891. Ed. Daniel Grojnowski. Paris: Thot, 1984. Kittang, Atle. Discours et jeu: Essai d’analyse des textes d’Arthur Rimbaud. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget; Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1975. Kristeva, Julia. Polylogue. Paris: Seuil, 1977. ---. La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Krysinska, Marie. Rythmes pittoresques. Ed. Seth Whidden. Exeter Textes littéraires 1. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003. Lacan, Jacques. “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud.” 1957. Écrits I. Paris: Seuil/Points Essais, 1966. 249-89. Lapeyre, Paule. Le vertige de Rimbaud. Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière, 1981. Lawler, James. Rimbaud’s Theater of the Self. Cambrdge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Leconte de Lisle, Charles. Articles, préfaces, discours. Ed. Edgard Pich. Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles lettres,” 1971. Lefrère, Jean-Jacques. Arthur Rimbaud. Paris: Fayard, 2001. Lepelletier, Edmond. Paul Verlaine: Sa vie, son œuvre. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1982. Lever, Evelyne. Marie-Antoinette. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1991. Trans. as Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France. Trans. Catherine Temerson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Little, Roger. Rimbaud. Illuminations. London: Grant & Cutler, 1983. ---. “‘H’: L’Énigme au-delà de l’énigme.” Revue des sciences humaines 56.184 (Oct.-Dec. 1981): 129-44. Livret-Chaix. Guide Officiel des voyageurs sur tous les Chemins de fer français et les principaux chemins de fer étrangers. Paris: Napoléon Chaix, 1847. Lloyd, Rosemary. “Théodore de Banville: La corde raide entre forme fixe et vers libre.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 104.3 (July-Sept. 2004): 655-72.

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Macklin, Gerald. “Perspectives on the Role of Punctuation in Rimbaud’s Illuminations.” Journal of European Studies 20.1 (March 1990): 59-72. ---. “The Reinvention of Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Illuminations.” Nottingham French Studies 35.2 (Autumn 1996): 60-75. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Igitur. Divagations. Un coup de dés. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Marquèze-Pouey, Louis. Le Mouvement décadent en France. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986. Martino, Pierre. Parnasse et symbolisme (1850-1900). 3rd ed. Paris: Armand Colin, 1930. Maza, Sarah. “L’image de la souveraine: Féminité et politique dans les pamphlets de l’affaire du Collier.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 287 (1991): 363-78. Mendès, Catulle. La légende du Parnasse contemporain. Brussels: August E. Brancart, 1884. ---. Le mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale / E. Fasquelle, 1903. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Meschonnic, Henri. “Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?” Langue française 56 (Dec. 1982): 6-23. ---. La rime et la vie. Paris: Verdier, 1989. Metzidakis, Stamos. “Did Rimbaud Really Know His Alphabet?” Nineteenth-Century French Studies French Studies 14.3-4 (SpringSummer 1986): 278-83. Meyer, Bernard. Sur les Derniers vers: Douze lectures de Rimbaud. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Milton, John. The Poems of John Milton. Ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler. London and Harlow: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1968. Minahen, Charles D. “Homosexual Erotic Scripting in Verlaine’s Hombres.” Articulations of Difference. Gender Studies and Writing in French. Ed. Dominique D. Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. 119-35. ---. Vortex/t: The Poetics of Turbulence. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

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Moréas, Jean. “Le symbolisme: Un manifeste littéraire,” Le Figaro: Supplément littéraire, 18 September 1886. Murat, Michel. “À propos de ‘Mouvement’.” Parade sauvage 4 (1986): 69-77. ---. L’Art de Rimbaud. Paris: José Corti, 2002. ---. “Rimbaud et le vers libre. Remarques sur l’invention d’une forme.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 100.2 (MarchApril 2000): 255-76 (rpt. in L’art de Rimbaud 437-58). Murphy, Steve. “Éléments pour l’étude des Poèmes saturniens.” Revue Verlaine 3-4 (1996): 165-274. ---. “Enquête préliminaire sur une ‘Famille maudite’,” Parade sauvage 20 (December 2004): 93-138. ---. “Les Illuminations manuscrites: Pour dissiper quelques malentendus concernant la chronologie et l’ordre du dernier recueil de Rimbaud.” Histoires littéraires 1 (2000): 5-31. ---. Le Premier Rimbaud ou l’apprentissage de la subversion. Paris: Éditions du CNRS; Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1991. ---. Marges du premier Verlaine. Paris: Champion, 2003. ---. Stratégies de Rimbaud. Paris: Champion, 2005. ---. “Trois manuscrits de Rimbaud.” Histoires littéraires 17 (2004): 34-57. Murphy, Steve, ed. Paul Verlaine. Special issue of L’École des lettres 14 (1995-96). ---, ed. Romances sans paroles. By Paul Verlaine. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Nicolas, Hun-Chil. “Autour de la genèse de Jadis et Naguère.” Gouvard and Murphy 387-418. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. New York: Penguin, 1993. Noël, Bernard. “‘De la pensée accrochant la pensée et tirant’.” Europe 69.746-47 (June-July 1991): 60-62. Nykrog, Per. “‘Ça ne veut pas rien dire’: Sur la lettre de Rimbaud à Georges Izambard [13] mai 1871.” Romanic Review 74.1 (Jan. 1983): 54-66. Osmond, Nick. Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations. London: The Athlone Press-University of London, 1976.

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Paliyenko, Adrianna M. “Discourse of the Self and Rimbaud’s ‘Lettres du voyant’: Alterity as a Creative Dialectic.” NineteenthCentury French Studies 21.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1993): 434-48. ---. Mis-Reading the Creative Impulse: The Poetic Subject in Rimbaud and Claudel, Restaged. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Le Parnasse contemporain: Recueil de vers nouveaux. 3 vols. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1866-76. Westmead, Farnborough, Hants.: Gregg International Publishers Ltd, 1970. Peschel, Enid Rhodes. “Rimbaud’s Response to Plato: The ‘Lettre du voyant’ and The Republic.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 6.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1977-78): 104-07. ---. “Themes of Rebellion in William Blake and Rimbaud.” French Review 46 (1973): 750-61. Petitfils, Pierre. Paul Verlaine. Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1994. Peyre, Henri. Rimbaud vu par Verlaine. Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1975. Plessen, Jacques. Promenade et poésie. L’expérience de la marche et du mouvement dans l’œuvre de Rimbaud. The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1967. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Oxford Book of American Essays. Ed. Brander Matthews. New York: Oxford University Press, 1914. The Police. “No Time This Time.” Reggatta de Blanc. A&M Records, 1979. Porter, Dennis. Rousseau’s Legacy: Emergence and Eclipse of the Writer in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Porter, Laurence M. The Crisis of French Symbolism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Rabaté, Dominique. “Énonciation poétique, énonciation lyrique.” Rabaté, ed. 65-79. Rabaté, Dominique, ed. Figures du sujet lyrique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France / “Perspectives littéraires,” 1996. Rabaté, Dominique, Joëlle de Sermet, and Yves Vadé, eds. Modernités 8: Le sujet lyrique en question. Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1996. Raybaud, Antoine. Fabrique d’Illuminations. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

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Reynolds, Dierdre. “‘L’hallucination des mots’: Textual and Imaginary Space in Rimbaud’s ‘Barbare’.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 28.1 (1992): 29-41. Richard, Jean-Pierre. Poésie et profondeur. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955. Richter, Mario. La crise du logos et la quête du mythe: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cendrars, Apollinaire. Trans. Jean-François Rodriguez. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1976. Ricœur, Paul. Temps et récit. Vol. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983. Riffaterre, Michael. “Hermeneutic Models.” Poetics Today 4.1 (1983): 7-16. ---. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978. ---. “Sylleptic Symbols: Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire’.” Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to Close Readings. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 17898. Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Revised ed. Seth Whidden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ---. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Antoine Adam. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ---. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Steve Murphy. tome I: Poésies (1999). Tome IV: Fac-similés (2002). Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999---. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Pierre Brunel. Paris: Librairie générale française / Le livre de poche “La Pochothèque,” 1999. Rimbaud, Isabelle. Reliques. 2nd ed. Paris: Mercure de France, 1921. Robichez, Jacques. Verlaine entre Rimbaud et Dieu: Des Romances sans paroles à Sagesse. Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1982. ---, ed. Œuvres poétiques. By Paul Verlaine. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1994. Ronsard, Pierre de. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

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Ruwet, Nicolas. “Parallélismes et déviations en poésie.” Langue, discours, société. Ed. Julia Kristeva, Jean-Claude Milner and Nicolas Ruwet. Paris: Seuil, 1975. 307-51. Sanchez, Joseph. “Référence et représentations dans les Romances sans paroles.” Murphy, ed., Paul Verlaine 121-35. Saunier, Claudius. Traité d’horlogerie moderne: Théorie et pratique. Paris: Bureau de la Revue Chronométrique, 1869. Schaeffer, Gérald. “Poèmes de la révolte et de la dérision.” Études sur les Poésies de Rimbaud. Ed. M. Eigeldinger. Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière, 1979. 81-132. Schaeffer, Gérald, ed. Lettres du voyant (13 et 15 mai 1871). By Arthur Rimbaud. Geneva: Droz, 1975. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Schneider, Mark A. “Cultural Studies as Fin-de-Siècle Culture.” Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice. Ed. John Mohr and Roger Friedland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 140-53. Schoenfeld, Marie Luise. “Sur l’inspiration de Rimbaud dans sa Lettre du voyant.” Zeitschrift fur Franzosische Sprache und Literatur 83 (1973): 10-19. Schor, Naomi. One Hundred Years of Melancholy. The Zaharoff Lecture for 1996. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. Schultz, Gretchen. The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 17. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999. Scott, Clive. Vers libre: The Emergence of Free Verse in France 1886-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Shryock, Richard. “Becoming Political: Symbolist Literature and the Third Republic.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2005): 385-98. Shryock, Richard, ed., Lettres à Gustave et Rachel Kahn (1886-1934). Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 1996. Stendhal [Henri Beyle]. Le rouge et le noir. Paris: Le livre de poche, 1958.

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Stephan, Philip. “Decadent Poetry in Le Chat noir before Verlaine’s ‘Langueur’.” Modern Language Quarterly 30.4 (December 1969): 535-44, Thines, Georges. “William Blake et Arthur Rimbaud: Deux visions de l’infernal.” Bulletin de l’Academie Royale de Langue et de Litterature Françaises 44.1 (1986): 12-27. Thomas, Chantal. “L’Héroïne du crime: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets.” La Carmagnole des muses: L’Homme de lettres et l’artiste dans la Révolution. Ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet. Paris: A. Colin, 1998. 245-60. Toulet, Emmanuelle, ed. Livres du Cabinet de Pierre Berès. Chantilly: Musée Condée, 2003. Troyat, Henri. Verlaine. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. Verlaine, Paul. Correspondance générale. Ed. Michael Pakenham. Vol. 1. Paris: Fayard, 2005. ---. Femmes/Hombres. Trans. William Packard and John D. Mitchell. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1977. ---. Œuvres poétiques complètes. Ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec and Jacques Borel. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ---. Œuvres en prose complètes. Ed. Jacques Borel. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Vickers, Nancy J. “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme.” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Winter 1981): 265-79. Vigny, Alfred de. Œuvres complètes. Ed. François Germain and André Jarry. Vol. 1. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Watteyne, Nathalie, ed. Lyrisme et énonciation lyrique. Quebec: Éditions Nota bene, 2006. Whidden, Seth. “À la Marie-Antoinette’: L’érotisme bisexuel dans ‘Reddition’.” Revue Verlaine 7-8 (2001): 121-32. ---. “Comment aller de ‘Trouver une langue’ à ‘Plus de mots’? Parcours d’une langue en devenir chez Rimbaud.” Langues du XIXe siècle. Ed. Graham Falconer, Andrew Oliver, and Dorothy Speirs. Toronto: Centre d’études romantiques Joseph Sablé, 1998. 247-60. ---. “Le Mur des Quat’z’Arts: ‘Merde pour celui qui le lira’.” Histoires littéraires 21 (January-March 2005): 139-47.

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---. “Réponse à une enquête: ‘L’homme à la grammaire espagnole’.” Histoires littéraires 22 (April-June 2005): 64-65. ---. “Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Aesthetics in ‘Vénus Anadyomène’.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 27.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999): 333-45. ---. “Sagesse, Paul Verlaine,” L’explication littéraire: Pratiques textuelles, ed. Ridha Bourkhis. Paris: Armand Colin, 2006. 185-92. Wilson, John. A Treatise on English Punctuation. With an Appendix Containing Rules on the Use of Capitals, a List of Abbreviations, Hints on the Preparation of Copy and on Proof-reading, Specimen of proof-sheet, etc. Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1862. Wing, Nathaniel. Between Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. ---. “Metaphor and Ambiguity in Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire’.” Romanic Review 63 (1972): 190-210. Whyte, Peter. “‘L’art’ de Gautier: Genèse et sens.” Relire Théophile Gautier: Le plaisir du texte. Ed. Freeman G. Henry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 119-39. Zayed, Georges. La Formation littéraire de Verlaine. (Geneva: Droz, 1962). Rev. ed. Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1970. Zimmermann, Eléonore. Magies de Verlaine. Geneva: Slatkine, 1981. Zissmann, Claude. “Verlaine décadent.” Gouvard and Murphy 33142.

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Index

Ahearn, Edward J., 187n127 Amiel, Henri Frédéric, 188 Ammirati, Charles, 92 Amprimoz, Alexandre L., 148 art pour l’art, l’, 14, 17-18, 27, 45, 131. See also Gautier, Théophile Augustine, Saint, 71, 141, 144, 161, 172 Badesco, Luc, 18n23, 19 Baju, Anatole, 116n98 Banville, Théodore de, 23-24, 32, 41, 48, 49, 120, 123n7, 131, 134 poems: “Une femme de Rubens,” 32-33 “Silence,” 170-71 “Songe d’hiver,” 171 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 49 Barrière, Théodore, 31 Bataillé, Christophe, 163n82 Baudelaire, Charles, 32, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 65-66, 93, 94n64, 103, 116, 123n7, 125, 126, 131, 144, 162, 178-79, 191 poems: “La beauté,” 32 “La chambre double,” 144, 162 “La chevelure,” 170 “Correspondances,” 93 “Épigraphe pour un livre condamné,” 50 “L’Héautontimorouménos,” 94n64 “L’horloge” [prose poem], 191 “L’horloge” [verse poem], 144 “La Musique,” 65 “Les Sept Vieillards,” 65n27

Beauclair, Henri, 116n98 Bell, David F., 190n133 Benveniste, Emile, 16, 193 Berès, Pierre, 146 Bergson, Henri, 10, 143-44, 172, 178 Bernadet, Arnaud, 15, 51 Bernard, Suzanne, 164n83 Bertrand, Marc, 155 Bivort, Olivier, 152n67, 154n70 Blake, William, 172, 187 Blès, Numa, 30 Bloom, Harold, 41-42 Bobillot, Jean-Pierre, 42n73 Borel, Jacques, 69-70n33 Bornecque, Jacques-Henry, 47, 50 Boyer d’Agen [Jean-Auguste Boyé], 155n72 Breton, André, 125n12 Briet, Suzanne, 168 Brunel, Pierre, 163n62, 167n85, 170n93, 180n113, 186, 201-02 Buisine, Alain, 70n34 Callias, Nina de [Nina de Villard], 91 Carter, A[lfred] E[dward], 116n98 Cazalis, Henri, 52-53 Cézanne, Paul, 29 Chambers, Ross, 168n86, 176, 178 Chambon, Jean-Pierre, 145n54 Chateaubriand, François-René, 22, 47n4 Chaucheyras, Thierry, 82n53 Chaussivert, J.-S., 71 Chovet, Lucien, 152n67 Claisse, Bruno, 180n113 Collot, Michel, 185 Commune de Paris. See Paris Commune

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Coppée, François, 28, 29-30, 90 Cornulier, Benoît de, 141, 146 Corsetti, Jean-Paul, 108, 112 Cros, Charles, 34-41 Dednam, Sabine, 121n5 Delahaye, Ernest, 93 Delvaille, Bernard, 25n4, 42n73 Demeny, Paul, 205 Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline, 15257, 197 Deschamps, Antoni, 65n27 Dillman, Karin J., 121n5, 124 Dürer, Albrecht, 52-53, 55 Eigeldinger, Marc, 122 Étiemble, René, 161 Felman, Shoshana 121n5, 126-27n14 Fongaro, Antoine, 96 Foucault, Michel, 185 Fowlie, Wallace, 51 France, Anatole, 25 free verse. See vers libre Frémy, Yann, 178n108 Fromentin, Eugène, 22 Gautier, Théophile, 14, 17, 20-21, 22, 38, 48, 49, 99-100, 116, 123n7 and l’art pour l’art, 14, 17-18 and gender ambiguity, 100 Geffroy, Gustave, 29 Giusto, Jean-Pierre, 108, 112, 175n102 Glatigny, Albert, 47 Goujon, Jean-Paul, 25n40, 29, 207 Guiraud, Pierre, 111 Guyaux, André, 121n5, 180n113, 184n119, 201n148 Hamburger, Käte, 196 Harkness, Nigel, 34n65 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9 Heine, Heinrich, 190

Herlagnez, Pablo de. See Verlaine, Paul Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 10 horlogy, 183, 186-90 Hugo, Victor, 17, 21, 41-42, 49, 123n7 Huret, Jules, 25-26, 28, 29 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 116 Impressionism, 90-91 Izambard, Georges, 121, 123, 164, 205 Kahn, Gustave, 28, 116 Keats, John, 39n69 Kristeva, Julia, 11, 12 Krysinska, Marie, 42n73, 116 Lacan, Jacques, 127-28 Laforgue, Jules, 116 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 14, 17, 123n7, 142 Lapeyre, Paule, 120n3, 136n32 Larousse, Pierre, 188, 189 Lawler, James, 191 Leconte de Lisle, Charles, 19-20, 28, 48, 49, 123n7 Lefrère, Jean-Jacques, 23, 24n39 Lemerre, Alphonse, 47, 101 Lepelletier, Edmond, 76, 102 Létinois, Lucien, 100 Little, Roger, 119n2, 145, 180n113, 184 Littré, Émile, 165, 168, 170, 184, 186, 191 Livret-Chaix, 188n129 Lloyd, Rosemary, 29, 134 Loti, Pierre, 22 lyric poetry, 9, 10, 38-39, 119-22 lyric subject, 9, 11, 27, 38-39, 62-67, 122, 127, 129, 132, 139. See also under individual poets in crisis, 11, 27, 39, 79-90, 92-94, 99-100, 112-14, 116-18, 208 and gender ambiguity, 99-100

Index

Macklin, Gerald, 16n20, 131n23, 138n37, 180n113 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 25-26, 27, 45, 63, 124, 171n95, 208 Manet, Edouard, 91 Marie Antoinette (queen), 111-15 Marquèze-Pouey, Louis, 116n98 Martino, Pierre, 45 Mauté, Mathilde, 70-71, 76 Mendès, Catulle, 18-19, 28, 35, 47 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 127, 128-29 Meschonnic, Henri, 12-13 Meyer, Bernard, 96, 147, 148, 151, 157, 161, 164n83 Milton, John, 187 Minahen, Charles D., 71, 108, 113n92, 139n38, 175-76n103, 196n144 Moirae (the Fates), 170n94, 173-74, 178 Monet, Claude, 91 Montaigne, Michel de, 71 Moréas, Jean, 25, 26 Mur, Le. See Quat’z’arts, les (cabaret) Murat, Michel, 42n73, 177-78, 179, 195, 196n144 Murphy, Steve, 41-42, 60n25, 77-78, 87n56, 125-26, 131-32, 140n41, 146, 163n82, 168n86, 174, 17576n203, 179n111, 202n151 Musset, Alfred de, 49, 123-24, 155n72 Napoléon III [Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte], 147-48 Nerval, Gérard de, 22, 78 Nicolas, Hun-Chil, 92n61 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 122 Noël, Bernard, 121n5 Nykrog, Per, 121n5 Osmond, Nick, 194 Paliyenko, Adrianna M., 121n5, 124 Paris Commune (Commune de Paris), 121, 147-48

227

Parnassianism (le Parnasse). See also Banville, Théodore de; Gautier, Théophile; Leconte de Lisle, Charles; Parnasse contemporain, le aesthetics of, 13, 14, 17-22, 25-27, 31-40, 56-57, 62, 67, 117-18, 120, 122, 129, 131, 134-35, 136, 195, 207, 209 compared to Symbolism, 14, 16, 18, 25-30, 207 and immobility, 31-40, 62, 195 and impassibility, 22 longevity of, 14, 24-28, 207 and Romanticism, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 41, 63, 207 Parnasse contemporain, le, 17, 21, 23, 24, 29, 30, 34, 39-40n70, 42, 45, 46, 51, 52, 61, 63, 66, 67, 101, 120, 131, 207 fourth volume of, 25n40, 29-30, 207 Peschel, Enid Rhodes, 121n5, 187n127 Petitfils, Pierre, 70n34 Petrarch, 33-34, 39 Peyre, Henri, 77n46 Pissarro, Camille, 91 Plato, 185 Plessen, Jacques, 119-20, 136, 14748, 158n75 Poe, Edgar Allan, 53, 55, 65n27, 78 Police, The, 144n51 Porter, Dennis, 124n8 Porter, Laurence M., 24, 65 Poulet-Malassis, Auguste, 103 Proust, Marcel, 96 Quat’z’arts, les (cabaret), 30 Rabaté, Dominique, 11 Raybaud, Antoine, 180n113 Reynolds, Dierdre, 182 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 169, 170 Richter, Mario, 121n5

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Ricœur, Paul, 138, 141-43, 144n49, 172 Riffaterre, Michael, 168-71, 174n99 Rimbaud, Arthur, 13, 15, 16, 23-24, 27, 30, 32, 39, 42, 49, 67, 69n32, 75-80, 86-87, 90-91, 9394, 96, 98, 102, 119-209 lettres dites “du voyant” (13 and 15 May 1871), 121-31, 136, 164, 196, 205, 208 and lyric subject, 14, 15, 16, 11920, 123-25, 132, 139, 140-41, 146-47, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158-61, 164, 166-67, 172, 17880, 181-82, 185-86, 189, 19192, 193-94, 195, 197-98, 199200, 201, 204-05, 208 and le Parnasse, 13, 30, 67, 120, 122, 129-30, 131, 134-35, 192, 195 and la poésie objective, 121-25, 130, 193 and sens, 15, 125-31 and vers libre, 130, 134 works: Illuminations, 16, 119, 120, 131, 133, 135, 145, 157, 165, 169, 179-80, 182, 184, 185, 192, 194, 199, 200, 208, 209 Une saison en enfer, 129, 142, 145, 148n61, 152, 158-59, 16667, 192 poems: “À la musique,” 135-36 “À une Raison,” 119, 131n23, 173, 205 “Accroupissements,” 136-37 “Adieu,” 158-59 “Âge d’or,” 158, 165-67, 195 “Alchimie du verbe,” 129, 148n61, 166 “Antique,” 96 “Après le déluge,” 199 “Les assis,” 136n32

Rimbaud, Arthur: poems (continued) “Bannières de mai.” See “Patience” “Barbare,” 180-83, 193, 205 “Bethsaïda, la piscine […],” 16970 “Bottom,” 184 “Ce qu’on dit au Poète à propos de fleurs,” 149-50 “Chanson de la plus haute Tour,” 157-58, 166 “Les corbeaux,” 163 “Le cœur volé,” 192 “Credo in unam.” See “Soleil et chair” “Démocratie,” 193n138 “Délires,” 129, 148n61 “Départ,” 192 “Enfance,” 133 “L’Éternité,” 141, 148, 158, 15964, 165, 169, 176, 197 “Fleurs,” 169 “Génie,” 131n23, 133 “H,” 183-94, 199 “Jeune goinfre,” 170-71n94 “Marine,” 194, 205 “Mémoire,” 168-79, 195 “Mouvement,” 194-205 “Ophélie,” 120, 131 “Parade,” 131n23 “Patience,” 96, 140-59, 161, 162, 166, 197 “Phrases,” 86n55 “Les premières communions,” 170-71n94 “Qu’est-ce pour nous, mon cœur […],” 138-40, 141 “Sensation,” 120, 131, 132-35, 139, 146 “Soleil et chair,” 120, 131, 135 “Vénus Anadyomène,” 132, 13637 “Vies,” 200 “Villes” (“L’acropole officielle […]”), 119

Index

Rimbaud, Isabelle, 129n20 Robichez, Jacques, 79, 117 Rodenbach, Georges, 171n95 Romanticism, 14, 18, 19, 21, 123-24, 126, 129, 207 Ronsard, Pierre de, 39, 105, 142, 150, 155-58, 177 Ross, Kristin, 121n4, 135-36, 139 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 71, 124 Ruwet, Nicolas, 145n54 Sade, Marquis de, 96 Sanchez, Joseph, 80n52 Sand, George [Aurore Dupin], 34 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 127, 128 Schaeffer, Gérald, 121n5, 126n14, 137 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 189-90 Schoenfeld, Marie Luise, 121n5 Schor, Naomi, 47n4 Schultz, Gretchen, 18n22, 34 Scott, Clive, 42n73 Shryock, Richard, 42n73 Stendhal [Henri Beyle], 105n76 Sully-Prudhomme [René Armand François Prudhomme], 28 Symbolism, 14, 16, 18, 25-27, 29, 63, 207, 209 aesthetics of, 25-28, 29 dominance of, 25-26 and obscurity, 25, 63 Thiboust, Lambert, 31 Thines, Georges, 187n127 Thomas, Chantal, 112 Toulet, Emmanuelle, 140n41 Troyat, Henri, 70n34 Valade, Léon, 70 Valéry, Paul, 170-71n94, 173 Verlaine, Paul, 13, 15, 24, 27, 30, 32, 42, 45-118, 173-74, 196, 197, 207-09 biographical criticism of, 50-51, 68n31, 70-71, 75-80, 94, 96-99, 117, 208

229

Verlaine, Paul (continued) and decadence, 115-18 erotic poetry of, 107-15 and lyric subject, 14, 15, 47, 50-63, 65-68, 70-72, 74-75, 79-90, 91, 93-100, 102-03, 104-06, 110, 112-14, 115-18, 208 and le Parnasse, 13, 23, 45-49, 97 works: Amour, 92, 94, 98-99, 100, 101, 102-03 Bonheur, 103 La Bonne Chanson, 15, 67, 6875, 77, 79, 85 Cellulairement, 92 Femmes, 107-15, 117 Fêtes galantes, 15, 68 Hombres, 107, 108, 112, 113, 117 Jadis et naguère, 49, 79, 92, 94, 98, 101, 102-03, 196 Parallèlement, 92, 94, 96, 10203, 107 Poèmes saturniens, 15, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52-69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 79, 85, 90, 103, 108 Romances sans paroles, 15, 69, 75-92, 94, 97, 100-01, 102, 108 Sagesse, 15, 69, 92-98, 102-03 Les Vaincus, 101, 110 poems (numbered and untitled poems are listed by first line): “À la Princesse Roukhine,” 10305, 114 “L’Angoisse,” 47, 52, 61, 63-67, 69n33 “Art poétique,” 79, 98, 196, 208 “Ballade Sappho,” 106-07 “Bonne simple fille des rues […],” 113 “Casta Piana,” 105 “Ce portrait qui n’est pas ressemblant […],” 99 “Ces passions qu’eux seuls […],” 96 “C’est l’extase langoureuse […],” 80-83

230

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Verlaine, Paul: poems (continued) “Chanson d’automne,” 56, 65, 75n39 “En robe grise et verte […],” 7273 “Epilogue,” 46 “L’espoir luit comme un brin de paille […],” 98 “Green,” 91-92 “Il faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner ces choses […],” 98, 103 “Il patinait merveilleusement […],” 99 “Il pleure dans mon cœur […],” 86-87 “Initium,” 67-68 “J’ai la fureur d’aimer […],” 99 “Je devine, à travers un murmure […],” 83-85, 92 “Je ne sais pourquoi […],” 94-97 “Langueur,” 115-18 “Mon Rêve familier,” 61-63, 68, 72, 79 “Nevermore,” 47, 55-57, 60, 63, 73 “Nocturne parisienne,” 58 “O la Femme! […],” 100-01 “Ô triste, triste était mon âme […],” 87-90 “Parfums, couleurs, systèmes, lois! […],” 93 “Parsifal,” 100 “A Poor Young Shepherd,” 91

Verlaine, Paul: poems (continued) “Pour Rita,” 113-14 “Prologue” [Poèmes saturniens], 52, 65, 75n39 “Puisque l’aube grandit […],” 7375 “Reddition,” 108-13, 115 “Rendez-vous,” 113 “Résignation,” 47, 53-55, 56, 60, 73 “Sappho,” 173-74 “Spleen,” 91 “Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois […],” 97 “Toutes grâces et toutes nuances […],” 72 “Les Vaincus,” 101-02 “Vœu,” 57-60 vers libre, 41-42, 116, 130, 134, 19497, 203, 205 Vicaire, Gabriel, 116n98 Vickers, Nancy J., 33 Vigny, Alfred de, 49, 148-49 Wilson, John, 188n129 Wing, Nathaniel, 100, 168n86, 175 Yuasa, Hiroo, 164n83 Zayed, Georges, 71, 76, 77, 78, 98 Zimmermann, Eléonore, 58, 88n57, 107-08 Zissmann, Claude, 116n97