A last pass at Rimbaud
"General, if an old cannon remains on your ruined ramparts, bombard us with lumps of dried earth. In the mirrors of luxurious stores! in parlors! Make the city eat its own dust. Oxidize the gargoyles. Fill bedrooms with the burning powder of rubies…”
Oh! the drunken gnat in the inn’s urinal, in love with diuretic borage and dissolved by a sunbeam! --A Season in Hell
and then, a few months later, he stopped writing. Wandered. Not because he burned out, but in order to escape the fate of that gnat. To live. And what are we doing here?
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Half written:
For Rimbaud, the goal of art, indeed of life, is to escape reality, because reality is oppression and pain. He dedicates himself to the "long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses…because he reaches the unknown" (Rimbaud 377, emphasis in original). The goal for Rimbaud is to escape the known into the unknown, and thus we must suppose that his writing will provide the key to understanding what Rimbaud considers the “known,” that being the reality which he shirks from. It could be argued that because Une Saison en Enfer is explicitly an insane rant, it makes no sense to try to infer or distil the real from it. However, in my reading of it, because he is seeking to escape the real, we can consider the real that which prevents him from living his fantasies. Because this is a tortured work, it endlessly bemoans that which represses him, and endlessly provides us glimpses into Rimbaud’s reality. Here, we will listen to one of the many passages in which he bemoans his endless flight from the real, in the hope that it will elucidate what is repressing him:
You cannot get away. –Let me follow the roads here again, burdened with my vice, the vice that sank its roots of suffering at my side as early as the age or reason—and that rises to the sky, batters me, knocks me down, drags me after it.
The last innocence and the last shyness. It has been said. I will not take into the world my betrayals and what disgusts me.
Let’s move on! The march, the burden, the desert, boredom, anger.
To whom can I sell myself? What beast must I worship? What sacred image are we attacking? Whose heart shall I break? What lie should I tell?—In whose blood shall I walk?
Rather, let me keep away from justice.—The hard life, simple brutishness.—let me lift up with a withered fist the coffin’s lid, and sit down and be stifled…(Rimbaud 269)
It is clear that in the beginning of the passage he is seeking to escape something inescapable—in my reading, that something is the knowable, the real: the world. Perhaps his vice is just this; his desire to be rid of the real. He will not take into the world his betrayals and his disgusts (a better translation of that line, Ne pas porter au monde mes dégoûts et mes trahisons, is probably: “I will not take into the world my betrayals and my disgusts.”), but he will not remove his betrayals and his disgusts, he will simply seek to remove himself form the world. And then, he presents us with his idea of what that world is to him, and what he would have to do to fit into it: he would have to sell himself. To subscribe to false ideologies and religions. To commit violence. This is Rimbaud’s vision of the real, and this is the justice that the real world offers him. He can feebly try to resist it with his starkly bleak image of the “withered fist from the coffin’s lid,” but he would rather resign himself to death, for that is the same as complacence. We will return to the ideas in this passage later.
The real, for Rimbaud, is the material and economic conditions that serve to enslave workers the world over, either as part of the wage system in Europe or the colonial slavery in the rest of the world under European influence. Rimbaud refuses to be a worker, because for him, work is the ultimate submission to reality. Early in Une Saison en Enfer, he says
I loathe all trades. All of them, foremen and workmen, are base peasants. A writer’s hand is no better than a ploughman’s. What a century of hands! I will never possess my hand. After, domesticity even to far off. (Rimbaud 265-267).
An unexamined read would offer the interpretation that Rimbaud distains the worker. However, it is not the worker which he claims to loathe, but the work itself, which forces one to kneel in submission to material reality and an unjust class system. To become a worker is to willingly become part of the mass, the expendable, inhuman workforce. It is important to remember that this was written only two years after the great battle of Paris, when workers were being slaughtered in the streets trying to defend their commune from the republican army invading from Versailles. Rimbaud did not view this as a noble battle, but as a demonstration of how expendable working class lives are to the political and economic system. He wrote to his schoolteacher, Georges Izambard, in 1871, almost immediately after the event, “I will be a worker: this idea holds me back, when mad anger drives me toward the battle of Paris—where so many workers are dying as I write to you! Work now? –never, never, I am on strike” (Rimbaud 371). Rimbaud is terrified of becoming one of the mass. Because that would mean a life of drudgery and an early, ignoble death. This context helps us read the following passage of Une Saison en Enfer:
“General, if an old cannon remains on your ruined ramparts, bombard us with lumps of dried earth. In the mirrors of luxurious stores! in parlors! Make the city eat its own dust. Oxidize the gargoyles. Fill bedrooms with the burning powder of rubies…”
Oh! the drunken gnat in the inn’s urinal, in love with diuretic borage and dissolved by a sunbeam! (Rimbaud 291, ellipsis in original)
Although it has been speculated by some scholars that Rimbaud is quoting someone else in this passage, no one has been able to place the quote. Therefore, it seems to me that he has simply written original prose in the voice of a different character: a general in the army of Versailles that is invading the Paris Commune. I make this connection specifically to the reference to the “old cannon remains on your ruined ramparts” because during the Paris Commune, the National Guard (the fighters on the Commune side) gathered all of the canons on the highest points of Paris, most notably in Montmartre, and it was these sites that were most vigorously attacked by the Republican Army. But it is the last line of the passage that truly elucidates Rimbaud’s stance on not only the specific issue of the Paris Commune, but also the status of workers and masses the world over: to be one of them is to drown, to lose all individuality and subjectivity in the most debasing and disgusting way imaginable. This is what happened to the workers defending Paris in 1871, and it is what happened to the colonized people in Mauvais Sang.
borage--n.a plant, Borago officinalis, native to southern Europe, having hairy leaves and stems, used medicinally and in salads.
diuretic--from the latin "diureticus"--Prompting Urine
I wikipedia'd it. Although borage can be used as a homeopathic remedy for PMS, it has no diuretic properties.
However, it is a hairy sack.
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