Acquisto on Cavallaro (2019)

Adrien Cavallaro’s study of Rimbaud’s reception from his own day to the mid-twentieth century traces the interesting genealogy of a familiar set of tropes about the poet’s life and work that are recognizable to most readers of Rimbaud. The author terms as rimbaldisme “l’expression formelle d’un ensemble de lectures de l’œuvre et de la trajectoire rimbaldiennes, c’est-à-dire un large corpus de productions critiques, fictionnelles, poétiques d’écrivains ou d’universitaires consacrées, par quelque biais que ce soit, à Rimbaud” (13). The story of Rimbaud’s reception, unique on account of its “construction éditoriale chaotique” (79) as well as the caesura in the poet’s life marked by his silence, is one where poets, novelists, and critics “écrivent moins sur Rimbaud dans leurs productions textuelles qu’ils n’élaborent avec son œuvre cette langue critique originale” (30). Through a clear exposition, and with judicious quotation from the authors that he considers, Cavallaro provides a lively critical history of the evolution of Rimbaud’s reception in its formative years.

Chapter one, “Du mythe au rimbaldisme,” introduces ideas about the intertwining of personal aspects of Rimbaud’s life that have taken on mythical status and the interpretation of his work. In its view of the œuvre rimbaldienne as a “répertoire de formules reprises à tout propos” (43), the study views the Rimbaldian myth as “la continuation de l’œuvre par d’autres moyens” (49). Rimbaud as a figure becomes the site of intersection of “mythes littéraires et mythologie personnelle” (50). The grandes lignes of the mythology are Symbolist, Catholic, and Surrealist myths. Chapter two, “La légende éditoriale de l’oeuvre rimbaldienne,” traces the early history of writers who assembled Rimbaud’s works, recreating the poet’s oeuvre retrospectively after his self-imposed poetic silence had begun. It outlines the role of Verlaine’s popularization of Rimbaud as poète maudit and the gradual foregrounding of “Alchimie du verbe” as a key text in establishing a Rimbaldian poetics. The chapter also delineates the editorial history of editions of Rimbaud’s Œuvres in 1898 and 1912 respectively, with comparative tables of their contents.

Chapter three, “Situations de Rimbaud,” establishes a contrast between temporal and atemporal views of Rimbaud, that is, approaches that situate him as a product of his particular historical moment and those that consider him as inventing a poetics that goes beyond the specifics of a historical moment, and toward a much larger modern poetic project. Cavallaro maintains that to write on Rimbaud in this period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century is “se demander au prisme du silence, s’il est admissible de considérer que des écrivains échappent à l’histoire de la littérature, ou ne s’y inscrivent qu’au prix d’une redéfinition profonde de ses visées” (143). This chapter explores the period when Rimbaud was, “in absentia, un poète décadent et symboliste” (152), with two opposing currents. The first, associated with La Vogue, underscored Rimbaud’s exceptionalism, while the writers of the Poètes maudits tendency sought to normalize him. Subsequent years saw a shift toward biographical and psychologizing approaches, of which the author takes Victor Segalen as representative; this view considered Rimbaud’s production as “le symptôme de dispositions psychologiques singulières” (175).

The Symbolist myth soon gave way in the early twentieth century to the competing approaches of the Catholic and Surrealist myths, represented chiefly by Paul Claudel, André Breton and, especially, Louis Aragon. The difference in each of these writers’ views can be seen in the choice of Rimbaud’s texts which they tended to privilege: “Là où l’herméneutique catholique voyait dans ‘Adieu’ un étrange monstre biographico-poétique, le point de jonction entre les deux vies, l’herméneutique surréaliste choisit donc avec ‘Alchimie du verbe’ un autre point de passage, …étranger aux questions relatives à la ‘vie d’aventures’” (205).  In chapter four, “Une poétique de la réception rimbaldienne,” we see the emergence of an emphasis on Rimbaldian formulas, culled in large part from the “Lettres du voyant,” “Délires II,” and “Adieu,” which have become indelibly associated with Rimbaud’s poetics from that moment on (“Car Je est un autre,” “Le Poète se fait voyant…,” etc.). This a posteriori reconstruction of Rimbaud’s poetics “participe …activement à la genèse du mythe du visionnaire halluciné” by “un habile travail de sélection et de redistribution” (244-5). Cavallaro demonstrates the infiltration of these selected tropes and keywords into writing on Rimbaud by quoting extended passages from writers and critics of the early twentieth century, who seamlessly integrate the keywords, often without quotation marks, into their writing on the poet. Cavallaro marks the keywords in bold, which makes for a clear illustration of his claim that these writers are writing not so much “on” as “with” a certain Rimbaud in a technique that he aptly labels “une alchimie de la fomule” (283).

 “La Légende rimbaldienne,” the fifth chapter, traces a brief history of biographies of the poet at the turn of the century notably the two published by Paterne Berrichon in 1897 and 1912, where “discours biographique et discours critique sont intimement liés” (335) in such a way that we can see fiction contaminating the biography, notably through readings that cull supposedly biographical details from works such as “Les Poètes de sept ans.” The chapter surveys Rimbaud’s presence in the work of a number of poets and novelists, with particular attention to Verlaine’s parodic “Vieux Coppées” (1875-77), which Cavallaro reproduces here in order to contrast their “légende familière,” aimed at a restricted poetic circle, with the more forward-facing poems “Laeti et errabundi” and the two sonnets entitled “A Arthur Rimbaud.”

Cavallaro’s narrative succeeds in demonstrating that, as he states in the conclusion, “Rimbaud est avant tout une langue en réinvention perpétuelle, structurée par une grammaire qui s’installe peu à peu dans un imaginaire collectif des écrivains et critiques” (434). Along the way, we encounter major literary voices of the period, from Stéphane Mallarmé to Max Jacob, Jean-Paul Sartre, René Char, and many others who have played a role in shaping the complex textual and biographical mythology within or against which contemporary scholars of Rimbaud continue to operate.