Connolly on Bardel (2023) and Vaillant (2023)

The poetic oeuvre of Arthur Rimbaud could be divided into four parts: the poems in verse written in 1870 and 1871, most often included in letters to friends and acquaintances; poems from 1872, which tend to be shorter, in which the versification is less regular, the phrasing more cryptic, and meaning harder to distinguish; the prose poems, mostly in Illuminations, including two poems in vers libre; and Une Saison en enfer. Alain Bardel and Alain Vaillant’s two slim volumes, both published in 2023, mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of the first publication of Une Saison en enfer in Brussels in 1873, a short text of some nine sections, written in the first-person singular voice. If it is not strictly speaking an autobiographical text, as both authors point out, then it possesses a significant autobiographical thrust, with the poet’s erstwhile mentor, lover, and witness Paul Verlaine describing it as “une espèce de prodigieuse autobiographie psychologique.” As Vaillant and Bardel both demonstrate, the book is the fruit of Rimbaud’s early and precise desire to “faire oeuvre,” that is, to become an author. It would ultimately be the only book seen to publication by the poet himself, Illuminations appearing through the efforts of Verlaine some thirteen years later in 1886. Upon the release of Une Saison en enfer, Rimbaud acquired a handful of copies of his new book from Jacques Poot’s “Alliance typographique,” which, we learn here, usually specialized in “juridical publications.” He delivered a copy to Verlaine, who by then was serving a prison sentence at Mons for shooting Rimbaud the previous July, with the simplest of dedications. Republished by La Vogue in 1886, it was only in 1901 that four hundred and twenty-five remaining copies of Une Saison en enfer, presumed destroyed, were rediscovered, giving fresh impetus to Rimbaud’s legend or “myth,” now as a prophet of twentieth-century literature in French, and to multiple reprintings from 1914 onward.

Vaillant and Bardel both acknowledge each other’s study without offering any commentary. Bardel has previously written on his colleague’s readings of Rimbaud, notably in a critique of the article “Bonheur” that appears in the Dictionnaire Rimbaud, edited by Vaillant alongside Adrien Cavallaro and the late Yann Frémy in 2021. Bardel’s book is divided into two halves: an essay entitled “Rimbaud l’Introuvable,” and a facsimile reproduction of the original edition of the work, with a facing-page commentary. Vaillant’s extended essay includes an introduction to the enigmatic poet’s life and work (including material published previously in the 2019 edition of Parade sauvage), to the Saison specifically, and a commentary not only of each of the book’s nine parts, but also of the subsections that further divide “Mauvais sang,” “Délires II–Alchimie du verbe,” and “Adieu.” Where Vaillant occasionally permits himself to draw analogies with works that Rimbaud most likely never read, such as Le Comte de Lautréamont’s 1869 Les Chants de Maldoror, Bardel excels when demonstrating the genetic dynamics of Rimbaud’s text, pointing to a number of probable intertexts, including Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias (1848) and Michelet;s La Sorcière (1862), and reflecting more generally on how available drafts and correspondence color the way we read the published version of the text. 

Anyone encountering Une Saison en enfer for the first time will be struck by its frequent reference to the Roman Catholicism in which the poet was raised. Bardel returns repeatedly to the topic, noting the constant temptation, and equally consistent denial, of religious consolation. André Breton initially claims Rimbaud as a precursor in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 (“surréaliste dans la pratique de la vie et ailleurs!”), only to condemn him in the 1930 edition of the same text for his perceived religious compulsion: “Rimbaud wanted to deceive us. He is guilty before us of having allowed, of not having made completely impossible, certain dishonorable interpretations of his thought, like those peddled by Claudel.” But Bardel is open to these ambiguities. He notes that the working title of “Nuit de l’enfer” was “Fausse conversion” (31), and that anyone reading “L’Impossible” (“Par l’esprit on va à Dieu!”) might be forgiven for elaborating a portrait of the poet as a “mystique à l’état savage” (41).

Vaillant’s analysis carefully demonstrates how what we know of Rimbaud’s life can help clarify our understanding of Une Saison en enfer. He notes, for instance, the young poet’s vibrant anticlericalism, although he admits “il serait bien sûr très excessif” (21) to reduce the Rimbaldian revolution to his reaction against the Church. There is the central place of sexuality in the work, allied with the difficulty of writing openly about being queer in France in the early 1870s, leading to numerous textual obfuscations. Neither can we overlook the unusual sequence of historical events that occurred at the time, including most notably the Franco-Prussian war (Rimbaud’s native Charleville-Mézières was on the front-line), and the establishment of the Third French Republic, briefly punctuated by the Paris Commune the following year. But perhaps most important is Rimbaud’s extraordinary intellect and early successes at school in Charleville, not to mention his remarkable ability to write poetry, all of which Vaillant ties to the study of Latin. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a pupil’s brilliance was measured less by prowess in science or mathematics than in the study of ancient languages. He notes the structural traces of Latin in Rimbaud’s economic deployment of syntax, reprising a reflection initially attributed to Baudelaire by Jules Romain. Poetry as Rimbaud encounters and commandeers it, is not to be understood as a mere instrument of adolescent rebellion or exacerbated sensibility, but as a legitimate vehicle for the intellectual ambition of a young man hungry for rapid success. 

Both Bardel and Vaillant present Rimbaud as the first modernist, that is, the first to operate a radical rupture in poetic language, seen in the repudiation of beauty declared in the second phrase of the “Prologue”: “Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux.—Et je l’ai trouvée amère.—Et je l’ai injuriée.” Vaillant ties this rupture to Rimbaud’s abandonment of versified forms, although Bardel is keen to stress the multiple planes upon which these ruptures operate: with his former friends and colleagues, including notably Verlaine (“Ainsi, j’ai aimé un porc”), and if not with literature, then with a period of his own literary production characterized in “Délires II–Alchimie du verbe” as “les élans mystiques et les bizarreries de style.” Both specialists share skepticism regarding the less traditional impulses of some contemporary scholarship. “On fait souvent trop confiance,” Vaillant asserts, “dans l’analyse de textes poétiques, à la polysémie surabondante de chaque mot, dès lors qu’il est détaché de la trame textuelle, comme si les poètes n’avaient aucun compte à rendre à la logique élémentaire du discours,” before cautioning that “tout latiniste, aux prises avec les lignes les plus cryptiques de Sénèque, Ovide ou Tacite, sait bien qu’il suffit d’achopper sur le sens d’un mot, sur un cas ou une forme verbale inattendus, sur une construction syntaxique anormale, puis de partir dans une mauvaise direction, pour être irrémédiablement égaré” (9). As a foil to his own readings, Bardel charily invokes the recommendations and current critical perspectives of literary theory and of “ces spécialistes rimbaldiens,” such as those who deny any coherence to the modified poems that appear in “Alchimie du verbe” (62). It would be helpful for any serious student of Rimbaud hoping to undertake their own research to know what each author is referring to in these instances, as this may include sources not mentioned in the brief bibliographies that both volumes provide to structure further reading.

Both authors stress that the audience Rimbaud likely had in mind for Une Saison en enfer would have included acquaintances and friends. Vaillant speaks of a two-fold lectorate composed of those the author knows and as well as of a reading public who know little or nothing about the author’s life. Although these two books also speak to a double audience, including a small group of Rimbaud experts, they are mainly addressed to a group of readers who may be encountering this poet’s oeuvre for the first time, or who have limited familiarity with Rimbaud and his work. It is to these that the authors address themselves when they evoke Rimbaud as a figure of revolutionary revolt. And yet I am not sure that the spark of Rimbaud’s famous document of teenage rebellion glows quite as brightly as it did during the latter decades of the twentieth century, when these two authors came, brilliantly, to know Rimbaud’s writings. It is probably fair to surmise that Une Saison en enfer is not currently what Vaillant calls “le bréviaire de toutes les jeunesse révoltées” (7). The days when Rimbaud’s Saison inspired the avant-garde of popular music, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Jim Morrison (see Wallace Fowlie’s 1994 Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet) have temporarily receded, although this is not to say that it will not suddenly and unexpectedly reassert itself in the public imagination. These two volumes will both serve as excellent companions to Rimbaud’s “sole” book, although Une Saison en enfer is ultimately a work that shows poetry to be a solitary life choice, a “terribly exiguous moral code” (18) as Vaillant says, one that will still provide immediate points of departure for aspiring artists and agitators of the extreme contemporary.