Alison wrote [on Rimbaud]:
> Surely a Marxist/Communard argument about the poems would be very hard
> to sustain? They're way too anarchic, way too metamorphic, way too
> internal - the petit visionary who keeps flaming out into a pile of dust
> (or merde).
Marxist or quasi-Marxist or Marx-informed and
Benjamin-informed readings of Rimbaud focus upon the pre-lettre du
voyant works which are as anarchic and metamorphic as the Revolutions
they respond to and call for. Marx`s own French political journalism
is pretty anarchic and metamorphic, esp. the 18th Brumaire. But the
post-voyant works which appear to me to garner the same sort of
attention are the more stabilised fables and travelogues in the
Illuminations, the two "Villes" poems, and "Ville" - usually read as
comments upon Haussmann`s root-and-branch makeover of Paris. There`s
also an interesting reading of "Soir historique", by Kristin Ross in
her book on Rimbaud and the Commune, tho` I agree with you, Alison,
that these readings often seem one-eyed, that their focus inevitably
misses more than it catches by imposing the status of "critique" upon
texts which just don`t offer enough evidence to make that status
plausible.
>At the most banal level, they could be seen as brilliant
> expressions of a certain kind of middle class adolescent angst - the
> drugs, the identification with rebellion, the self hatred, the
> egocentricity. They'd be tedious if they weren't so sceptical and
> beautiful and extreme (and the other qualities that make them poems).
The class and adolescence issues are useful and complex, esp. in
nineteenth century. (Incidentally, why M/CLASS adolescent angst?)
Wasn`t Stendhal one of the most important diplomats of Europe at a
ridiculously young age, 17 or 18? Adolescence is probably a 19th
century invention. Before that, your dad sharpened your teeth into
points and scarred you for life and that was it, no hanging around on
street corners and moping around your room listening to the Verve.
By running away from home, and refusing to get a job, Rimbaud enjoyed
an adolescence that his brother didn`t. Declasse Paris journos and
writers and painters provided a milieu in which he
could indulge in behaviour we recognise now as "adolescent"; they
were all doing the same thing and were in their thirties. If he
hadn`t got into left-wing politics and poetry, he would have left
school and went straight into the fields on the farm. Adding one,
two, three, four years onto the standard number of years the w/class
and lower m/class (a recent invention) were expected to serve, in
order to provide employers with a properly technically-equipped
labour force, meant that governments created adolescents...then they
turn around and DON`T give them jobs, thereby creating delinquents.
My body has been taken over by the spirit of Andrew Duncan. This
improvised rambling stops here. I think what I was going to say was,
there are very few poems by Rimbaud I would want to call
"adolescent". Perhaps none.
robin
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