Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World

28 Pages·2014·3.15 MB·English

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Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World:
Rimbaud and Revolutionary Artifice
 1 Author’s Note: This essay was first written in 1996 and updated for its
present publication. Special thanks to Ann Lauterbach for her com-
ments on the essay’s first draft back in the 1990s.
Editor note: Photo credits and bio note at the end.
Introduction
 2 Walter Benjamin records, in his ‘Conversations with Brecht: Svend-
borg Notes,’ the playwright’s interpretation of Arthur Rimbaud’s
‘The Drunken Boat’:
 3  [Brecht] compares [Johannes R.]
Becher’s poem to Rimbaud’s. In
the latter, he thought, Marx and
Lenin, too – had they read it –
would have detected the great
historical movement of which
it is an expression. They would
have recognized very clearly that
it does not describe the perambu-
lations of an eccentric stroller, but
the vagabond flight of a person
who can no longer endure the
limits of his class, which – with
the Crimean War, the Mexican
adventure – was beginning to
open up exotic parts of the world
to mercantile interests. To assim- Brecht and friends, Berlin,
ilate the gesture of the unfettered May Day 1954
vagabond, putting his affairs in
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the hands of chance and turning his back on society, was patently
impossible for the stereotype of the proletarian fighter. [See Note 1]
 4 The ‘stereotype’ Brecht was attacking was that of Becher himself
– ‘When Becher says “I”, he believes himself – as president of the
Union of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers in Germany – to be
exemplary. Only no one wants to follow the example.’ Brecht had
just been explaining to Benjamin how the writer becomes ‘proletar-
ianized, and utterly so’ when ‘the development of his own means
of production are concerned.’ [2] Though it is not clear in these
notes what Brecht meant by ‘his own means of production’ – is
this self-education? the tools of publishing? – Brecht implies that
the writer, when writing, developing skills and even publishing,
moves from the position of being a consumer to a producer, thus
transcending an early class identification. Benjamin himself clar-
ifies this position through an analysis of the newspaper, film and
Brecht’s Versuche in ‘The Author as Producer’ (a paper Benjamin
Brecht presented at The Institute for the Study of Fascism in April
1934, a few months before this passage of the ‘Svendborg Notes’
was written).
 5 Brecht understands Rimbaud to have been the chronicler of this
peculiar class mobility of the artist, though the poet is not engaged
in the sort of collective, non-individualistic world struggle of, say,
later poets such as the British Christopher Caudwell, Louis Aragon
during the French Resistance, or the American George Oppen. That
Rimbaud may have been overwhelmed but delighted by the contin-
gencies of this historical movement is apparent in the poem’s most
famous quatrain: ‘And from then on I bathed in the Poem / of the
Sea, infused with stars and lactescent, / devouring the green azure
where, pale / and elated, a thoughtful drowned figure sometimes
sinks. [3] The repetitions in the next group of quatrains, which all
begin with the word ‘Je’ – Je sais, J’ai vu, J’ai reve, J’ai suivi – indi-
cate more than the poet’s youthful pride in having ‘seen it all’ but
1  Walter Benjamin, Reflections (Schocken Books, 1978), pg. 204.
2   Benjamin, pg. 203.
3  Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works and Selected Letters, translated by Wallace
Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pg. 115.
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also his experience of ‘the game of possibilities’ (to borrow Baudril-
lard’s phrase). The poet is in the center of language, at the nexus of
the various exchanges that comprise the process of communication,
and – in Brecht’s interpretation – is also a symptom of Capitalism’s
internal contradictions.
 6 In his short essay ‘Rimbaud as Capitalist Adventurer,’ Kenneth Rex-
roth records a similar interpretation of the poem, but he is not quite
so impressed with the goals of the young poet. Rexroth writes:
 7  He applied to literature, and to litterateurs, the minute he laid eyes
on them, the devastating methods of total exploitation described
so graphically in the Communist Manifesto. Some of them were not
very applicable. He ‘ran’ the vowels like he later ran guns to the
Abyssinians, with dubious results. Usually, however, he was very
successful – in the same way his contemporaries Jim Fiske and P.T.
Barnum were successful. He did things to literature that had never
been done to it before, and they were things which literature badly
needed done to it… just like the world needed the railroads the
Robber Barons did manage to provide. [4]
 8 Though Rexroth does have kinder things to say about Rimbaud’s
poetry — ‘Rimbaud [is] a sort of magician of the sensibility — of
that specifically modern sensibility invented by Blake and Hölderlin
and Baudelaire — and an innovator in syntax, the first thoroughly
radical revealer of the poetic metalogic which is the universal char-
acteristic of twentieth-century verse.’ – the implication is that Rim-
baud’s poetic adventure was motivated by a similar sort of avidity
that drove him as a trader.
 9 Rexroth concludes: ‘The old monument to Rimbaud in Charleville
ignores his poetry and memorializes him as the local boy who made
good as a merchant and hero of French imperialism in the Africa
where the aesthetes who were never good at business think he
went to die unknown, holding the Ultimate Mystery at bay.’ This
puts Rimbaud at an even greater distance from the image of the
4  Kenneth Rexroth, Bird In Bush: Obvious Essays (New York: New Directions,
1947), pg. 44.
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‘eccentric stroller’ that Brecht was negating; furthermore, it places
him on the other side of the Marxist-Leninist imperialist equation.
 10 Brecht saw the poet’s exploitation of the materials of language as
necessary for the expression of the movement of history by a poet
who is only a small part, a subject, of it (perhaps even as a member
of the proletariat), but Rexroth, keeping in mind Rimbaud’s later
career as a gunrunner and colonizer of Africa, sees the opportunist.
 11 Rexroth also takes pains to refute the understanding of Rimbaud
as ‘a sort of combination of Bakunin and St. John of the Cross’;
this is in contrast to Brecht’s appreciation of Rimbaud’s anarchist
(‘putting his affairs in the hands of chance’) aesthetic as the toppler
of class and cultural hierarchies. Rimbaud fortified hierarchies in
Rexroth’s view – he did not describe or experience a ‘derangement’
of language – ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’ in the original – that
would eventually collapse bourgeois values and result in the more
liberating forms of Modernism, but rather trapped and hoarded lan-
guage in poems that would later be understood by the authorities –
as well as the poets who would benefit from his formal innovations
– as ‘Art.’
 12 The poem, in this sense, became another
coin for the piggy-banks of nationalists, who
never understand art as anything more than
the proof of a superior culture, symbolized
by Rexroth by the statue of the young poet in
Charleville.
 13 While Rexroth’s misgivings – written in
the heat of the Beat moment in 1957 – offer
a valuable demystification of the life and work of
Sketch of poet Arthur
the poet, Brecht’s earlier assessment provides rich
Rimbaud by Cazals
ground for a consideration of Rimbaud’s work in re-
lation to political thought. This essay compares Rimbaud’s concep-
tion of the ‘alchemy of the word’ with Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s
idea of the ‘image-complex’ as she describes it in her 1978 study
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Poetic Artifice. Forrest-Thomson’s book provides a critical language
for much of what is only implied in Rimbaud’s poem, in that it
describes in semi-technical language the space of ‘non-meaning’ in
a poem in which the worlds inside and outside a poem meet, while
at the same time maintaining these dichotomies of ‘inside’ and ‘out-
side’ – here and there – necessary for a theory of literary ‘alchemy.’
The work of American ‘language’ poets Charles Bernstein and
Bruce Andrews is central to this argument, since their work is most
singularly and directly concerned with the role the poet plays as
arbiter of cultural values – whether as creator, destroyer, animator
or aggravator.
Countering Romanticism
 14 A basic understanding of the Romantic concept of history can be
gleaned from Shelley’s essay ‘A Defense of Poetry,’ in which civili-
zation is understood to have had an ‘infancy’ from which the pres-
ent civilization – through revolution and a progressive democratic
liberation from tyranny – has derived. Shelley writes: ‘The poems
of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece;
they were the elements of that social system which is the column
upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed.’ [5] The culture
of Greece is understood as the foundation of all cultures following
it – a sort of Platonic ideal of which later generations were merely
flawed copies.
 15 As Shelley implies here and elsewhere, the poet stood at the center
of this culture, having illuminated the way that the more active
agents in culture – the politicians, the warriors, the social architects
– would take in shaping it. Shelley’s claim is that the poet is indis-
tinguishable from the motion of history; earlier, he compares the
work of poets to ‘the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an
5  ‘A Defense of Poetry,’ Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 1977), pg.
486.
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Aeolian lyre,’ as if the poet were the mere plaything of the ‘gods,’
who, in a materialist view, are really just historical forces.
 16 About fifty years after the ‘A Defense of Poetry’ was written, Rim-
baud wrote ‘A Season In Hell,’ in which he expresses his disillusion-
ment with this Romantic ideal. In ‘Season,’ the image of the poet is
no longer that of a healthy, integrated individual, but is rather the
opposite – the criminal, the sick man. Poets are no longer lighting
the path that ‘everyone’ will take in the march of civilization, but
are merely inventors of monstrosities, isolated orphans on the side-
lines. Rather than being the ‘nightingale’ of Shelley’s ‘Defense,’ the
poet (as Rimbaud writes in his famous ‘Letter of the Seer’ [’Lettre
du Voyant’, to his teacher Paul Demeny, written on 15 May 1871]) is
comparable to the ‘camprachico’ – the mythical mutilators of chil-
dren who later displays them for money created by Victor Hugo in
his 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs – or
a ‘man implanting and cultivating warts
on his face.’ [6] The language of Roman-
ticism is acidly deformed in the poetry of
Rimbaud:
 17  Work of man! This is the explosion which
lights up my abyss from time to time.
‘Nothing is vanity; science and onward!’
cries the modem Ecclesiastes, name-
ly Everyone. And yet the bodies of the
wicked and the slothful fall on the hearts
of others. Ah! come quickly! out there,
beyond the night… shall we miss those
eternal rewards?
– What can I do? I understand what Cover, graphic comic version of
work is, and science moves too slowly. I see Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel ‘The Man
clearly that prayer gallops and light thun- Who Laughs’.
ders. This is too simple. And it is too hot.
People will get along without me. I have my duty. I will be proud of
it in the fashion of several others, by putting it aside.
6  Rimbaud, pg. 307.
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My life is worn out. Come! let’s pretend, let’s be idle, O pity! We
will exist by amusing ourselves, by dreaming of monstrous loves
and fantastic universes… [7]
 18 Rimbaud pens an anthem for the radical nature of Modernist indi-
viduality, which involves, among other things, a courting of perver-
sions, a precise but arbitrary overturning of cultural values, and a
total refusal to engage in the most minute aspect of practical daily
living. This is Goethe’s laconic Werther taken to a new extreme –
blue jackets replaced by ‘fists in torn pockets’ (‘Ma Bohème’) – for
the (male) poet does not even idolize (feminine) beauty any longer,
but rather the ‘monstrous’ and ‘fantastic’ – suicide won’t be his
end, but idleness. The Romantic’s belief in history as the march of
democratic liberation is contaminated by the oppression that the
leveling aspects of bourgeois society exerts on the artist – a com-
mon theme of adolescent rebellion, here raised to the level of ethics.
 19 Democracy and eternal ‘brotherhood’ may have arrived, but so has
stagnation. Rimbaud writes: ‘Work seems too slight for my pride.’
[8] Rimbaud is unable to conform to history’s slowness; history
simply cannot keep up with the explosive illuminations to which he
felt subjected.
 20 The result is that the poet, who was once permitted to warble ‘in
darkness, singing to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds’ [9]
(Shelley) and yet remain society’s ‘unacknowledged legislator,’ is
now exiled from the mainstream of history’s march. The poet’s
imagination takes on a new importance – neither God nor Neces-
sity governs its machinations. The deranged imagination becomes,
itself, governor, and discovers that there is freedom in disorder, and
beauty in chaos. Rimbaud describes this new understanding in a
section called ‘Alchemy of the Word’:
7  Rimbaud, pg. 205.
8  Rimbaud, pg. 220.
9  Shelley, pg. 480.
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 21  It is my turn. The story of one of my follies.
For a long time I had boasted of having every possible land-
scape, and found laughable the celebrated names of painting and
modern poetry.
I liked stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets, back-drops for
acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old-fashioned literature, church
Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmoth-
ers, fairy tales, little books from childhood, old operas, ridiculous
refrains, naive rhythms.
I dreamed of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of
republics with no history, of hushed-up religious wars, revolutions
in customs, displacements of races and continents: I believed in
every kind of witchcraft. [10]
 22 Rimbaud overturns, in a catalogue of artistic ‘monstrosities’ – his
own island of misfit toys [11] – a series of cultural assumptions
regarding beauty and success; in this way, he anticipates the twenti-
eth century attraction to readymades, ‘outsider art’ and kitsch. Uto-
pian ideals are both embodied and destroyed; the knowableness of
the scientific universe is sacrificed to the preference for ‘unrecorded
voyages of discovery’ and ‘every kind of witchcraft.’ Only Blake
and perhaps Yeats and Dickinson, among English-language poets,
seems to have had the power to make the great substitutions – an
imaginative universe in place of the ‘rational’ one – that Rimbaud
describes here. (French writers, from Lautréamont, Jarry and Rous-
sel to Genet, Queneau and Debord would make a tradition of it.)
 23 However, it is the adolescent Rimbaud, then on the verge of
terminating his writing career, who speaks of these imaginative
escapades, these substitutions, in the past tense, as his ‘follies.’ He
continues:
 24  I invented the color of the vowels! – A black, E white, I red, O blue,
U green. – I regulated the form and movement of each consonant,
10  Rimbaud, pg. 193.
11  Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, a Christmas television special produced in stop
motion animation by Rankin/Bass in 1964.
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and, with instinctive rhythms, I prided myself on inventing a poetic
language accessible some day to all the senses. I reserved transla-
tion rights.
It was at first a study. I wrote out silences and the nights. I re-
corded the inexpressible. I described frenzies.
 25 It is the dual nature of letters – their role as mere elements in a
word, and the role they can play in the evocation of colors and
meaning – that best describes the synthesis that occurs in the
‘alchemy of the word.’ Rimbaud’s synaesthetic sense permitted him
to see the transformative power of even the naked vowel. What is
most important, for now, is that Rimbaud sees himself as possessing
the power to regulate a total artwork – a Gesamtkunstwerk for the
page – one that will be ‘accessible someday to all the senses.’
 26 Rimbaud conjures the phantasmagoria of history in the ‘Season
In Hell.’ The most famous use of this word in poetry is in Pound’s
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley – ‘He had moved amid her phantasma-
goria, / Amid her galaxies’ – but this ‘phantasmagoria’ might be
better compared to the state of being the ‘still center’ of the ‘turning
world’ as described in Eliot’s Four Quartets, and involves a sense
of divorce from, but power over, the ghostly movement of objects
through time. In this Cartesian point beyond the flux of imma-
nence – an imagined stasis – things become plastic and malleable,
subject to a form of ‘alchemy,’ not so much in themselves – the poet
doesn’t turn lead into gold – but in the way one perceives them,
this latter function dissolving the necessity of the former.
 27 It is best expressed by Rimbaud’s catalogue – church Latin, erotic
books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers – but also
in his hallucinogenic perception of a ‘virtual’ or alternative world
of ‘hushed-up religious wars.’ Rimbaud finds himself able to go
backwards in time, to reverse history’s motion, having discovered
that one need only look the other way, and in the folds of this tur-
bulence he upsets cultural values. Significantly, Rimbaud rejects the
power that has been granted him by this new understanding of the
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imagination; its power is one of the many veils of illusion that he
discards – in his total thrust for demystification – in ‘Season.’
The Art of Politics
 28 The sentiments of Rimbaud’s poem, which recorded the ‘folly’ of
one person’s experience of the historical phantasmagoria, began
to be put to political purposes by Modernist artists. A major early
Modernist manifesto, written by F. T. Marinetti and published in
1909 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, is one of the more extreme
of these statements. He lists the
aims of the Futurist program:
 29  1. We intend to sing the love
of danger, the habit of energy and
fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt
will be essential elements of our
poetry.
3. Up to now literature has
exalted a pensive immobility,
ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to
exalt aggressive action, a feverish
insomnia, the racer’s stride, the
mortal leap, the punch and slap.
Tato, Flying over the Coliseum in a Spiral,
4. We say the world’s magnifi-
1930. Ventura Collection, Rome.
cence has been enriched by a new
Photo: Corrado De Grazia.
beauty: the beauty of speed. A
racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of
explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot –
is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. [12]
 30 This type of outrageousness – not to mention the garrulous
optimism – had been already both celebrated and disavowed by
Rimbaud; furthermore, the element of youthful joy and personal
submission, as expressed in the ‘The Drunken Boat,’ has been lost
12  F. T. Marinetti, Let’s Murder The Moonshine: Selected Writings (Los Angeles: Sun
& Moon, 1991), pg. 49.