A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

Whose wires have the strange movement of a [calligraphic] flourish.)

  But, more frequently, the precise and the imprecise are not so easily differentiated.

  There are two further elements to be extracted from the lines of “Après trois ans.” First, the sonority in /ɛ/ (“Grêle”). This unrounded, low-mid, half-open front vowel seems to activate, to summon up, a significant strain in the Verlainian lexicon: “frêle” (frail), “frais” (fresh), “faible” (weak), “blême” (pale), “incertaine” (uncertain), “verser” (pour), “bercer” (lull/rock/cradle), “se plaignent” (complain), “aigre” (sour/shrill/bitter), “maigre” (thin), “détresse” (distress), “cruel.” To listen to the music of this verse is not only to listen for the acoustic susceptibilities of a particular psycho-affective organism, but also to hear the processes of acoustic modulation and sedimentation. Sounds act as agents of permeability, ineluctably drifting across the whole genealogy of their relations:

  Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant

  D’une femme inconnue, et que j’aime, et qui m’aime

  (“Mon rêve familier”)

  (I often have this strange and penetrating dream

  Of an unknown woman, whom I love, and who loves me)

  (“My Familiar Dream”)

  This suffusive influence of sound summons questions of tone, tempo, timbre, intonation, and all those other features of voice that for Verlaine constitute inflexion and that, for him, listening anxiously to the voices in his own poetry, are a constant, nervous preoccupation. What does all this “music” resolve itself into: “plainte” (lament), “murmure” (murmur), “romance” ([love-]song), “chant” (singing/melody), “antienne” (antiphon), “cri” (cry), “gémissement” (moaning), “refrain,” “voix lointaine, et calme, et grave” (distant voice, both calm and grave), “voix douce et sonore, au frais timbre angélique” (soft and sonorous voice, with a fresh, angelic timbre), “musique fine” (delicate music)? On his answer, his happiness and destiny may depend.

  The other element here is Verlaine’s favoring of the preposition “parmi.” How can “parmi” be used with a singular noun?

  C’est tous les frissons des bois

  Parmi l’étreinte des brises

  (“Ariettes oubliées I”)

  (It is all the tremors of the woods

  Amidst the tight embrace of breezes)

  And how can one be “parmi” experiences as intangible or generalized as “odeur” and “étreinte”? The simple answer is that “parmi” is not just a passive (unlocatable) position; it actively projects multiplicity or multifacetedness into the singular and invests the intangible with proximity and palpability. The poet-subject may often seem to be “parmi” the sense of his own words.

  Is it useful to think of Verlaine as an impressionist? Yes, because of the tension he creates between sensation and mood, between the individual word thrown into relief and the evanescent (musical) envelope, between the individual brushstroke and the overall blendings. Not only has Verlaine radically shifted attention from the object, the percept, to the perceiving consciousness, but this perceiving consciousness relates neither to a unified identity nor to an autobiographical narrative—it floats free, no longer sure of its anchorages or points of reference. If one thinks of Verlaine’s verse music as the equivalent of impressionist light, then one might say that it distributes and nuances verbal coloration; not that verbal meaning is cancelled, but its importance lies less in its representational capacity than in its communication of perceptual tonalities. If the Baudelairian street-artist is propelled by the speed necessary to the gathering of visual information, the dynamics of Verlainian utterance derive from the volatility of atmospheric conditions. About his symbolism, on the other hand, we might be less certain. While he has many of the symptoms (the inhabitation of dream, synesthesia, the cultivation of silence and its suggestibility), his verse lacks a metaphysical extension, wrapped around in mysticity though it may be.

  Commentators tend to confine Verlaine’s poetic achievements to his collections up to and including Jadis et naguère (1884–85), with some misgivings about the quality of the poems of anticipated marriage to Mathilde Mauté (La bonne chanson [The Good Song], 1870) and those of his Catholic conversion while in prison in Belgium (1873–75), principally at Mons, after wounding Rimbaud (Sagesse [Wisdom], 1880). There are certainly voices, among both critics and translators, that argue persuasively against the wholesale abandonment of the later collections; but there is still a case to be made that, by the later 1880s, Verlaine’s poetic vein had been worked out. By this time, he had exhausted the liberties (vers libéré) he wished to take with regular versification, liberties that stopped well short of free verse (vers libre). Even after the emergence of vers libre in 1886, he wrote, in August 1887, to Gustave Kahn, one of the pioneers of vers libre, along with Laforgue, that while he applauded the flouting of overpunctilious rhyming and syllable-counting, “I am nonetheless in favor of very flexible rules, but rules even so.” Those existential patterns that we come to recognize as characteristic of Verlaine could only be repeated: an emotional dependency countervailed by an urge to freedom (from all responsibility) that could not, however, be sustained; a plaintive self-pity without clearly visible causes; a resistance to the developmental in the interests of the dispersively enumerative; failures of identification in the face of the dubitative and the evanescent; the surfacing of memories that the poet does not particularly want to remember, or has no particular reason to remember. Yet it is Verlaine’s ability to capture the ripplings of consciousness at its lower levels, the kinetics of the psyche, the flickering modulations of affective reaction in a subjectivity without a subject, in a sentience divorced from a sentient being, that constitutes his poetic distinction.

  There are, broadly speaking, two ways of thinking about the excessive expressive force by which poetry seeks to empower language: either it projects language beyond itself, infralinguistically or ultralinguistically; or it increases the intensity, the interiority, of language itself. The latter way naturally preoccupies itself with the recovery of identity through language’s own recovery of identity. The former is concerned with the adventures of consciousness prior to, or after, identity. Verlaine might be seen as a poet of infralinguistic projection, a poet of preverbal sounds (murmurings, rustlings, whisperings, pure vocality) and emotions (semiconscious, affective states), whose Catholic conversion constitutes an unconvincing flirtation with the ultralinguistic.

  Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), on the other hand, may seem a hunter after the ultralinguistic, not so much in a metaphysical sense—his hells and paradises are more immanent—as among alternative consciousnesses:

  Il n’aimait pas Dieu; mais les hommes, qu’au soir fauve,

  Noirs, en blouse, il voyait rentrer dans le faubourg

  (“Les poètes de sept ans”)

  (He did not love God; but the men he saw, in the tawny evenings,

  Dark-faced, in overalls, coming home to the faubourg)

  (Seven-Year-Old Poets)

  But Rimbaud is not only still shackled by the pull of autobiographical identity (even if fictional), by virtue of which he is a rebel, a social outlaw, one of the colonized, and a master of creative ceremonies, but his divorce from himself (“Car Je est un autre” [Because I is an other], letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871) is also both a transformation of self into other and a transformation of self into its own capacities (“If brass—wakes up as bugle, it’s not its fault. That’s clear enough to me: I am present at the flowering of my own thought,” letter to Demeny). Grafting oneself onto other perceptual consciousnesses and cultivating the consciousness of self look like variations on the Baudelairean duality of the “evaporation” and “centralization of the Self.” But, for Rimbaud, Baudelaire, despite being the “first seer,” is still constrained by an “over-artistic milieu” and by a form that is “mean-spirited” (letter to Demeny). Both poets use the word “charité” to describe their prostitutions
of the soul, but Rimbaud’s is more monstrous, more self-deformative—was this a motive in his stormy relationship with Verlaine?—and his monitoring of his own consciousness does not have the ironic poise of dandyism in view, but rather the development of multisensory thought-in-language as the key to a universal language that “will be of the soul for the soul, synthesizing everything [tout], perfumes, sounds, colors, thought latching onto thought and tugging” (letter to Demeny). Different forms of “tout” recur like a mantra in the Rimbaldian enterprise: totality is a presupposition of all phenomena, and the “unknown” he invokes is both a sharing of consciousness and the sense of the infinite extendability of all experience. This is all a thoroughly symbolist project. Perhaps the poet will be able to outflank his own existential contradictions in the very inclusivity (the tout perspective) of his perceptual range.

  Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873) addresses this persistent quandary. Rimbaud seems, at one and the same time, to be subject to a kind of creative megalomania (“seer”) or control freakdom (“J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” [I alone have the key to this barbarous sideshow] [“Parade” / “Sideshow”]; “Je réservais la traduction” [I reserved the rights to translation] [“Délires II: Alchimie du verbe” / “Deliriums II: Verbal Alchemy”]); a childlike wonder in face of the universe’s capacity so variegatedly to animate itself despite him; and an unscrupulous kidnapper of alien consciousnesses: “A chaque être, plusieurs autres vie me semblaient dues” (To each being, several other lives seemed to me due) (“Délires II: Alchimie du verbe”). These inner contradictions are perhaps expressed in the desperate paradox of his creative enterprise: “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” (a long, immense and reasoned disordering of all the senses) (letter to Demeny).

  What makes Rimbaud exhilarating reading is his pursuit of recklessness, by which we might understand four things: (1) a readiness to start from scratch without obligations and limitations; (2) the adoption of values without reflection, with the consequence that abstractions/concepts, for example, come directly into being as living forces rather than being merely called upon as moral points of reference:

  Sur les routes, par les nuits d’hiver, sans gîte, sans habits, sans pain, une voix étreignait mon cœur gelé: Faiblesse ou force: te voilà, c’est la force. Tu ne sais ni où tu vas ni pourquoi tu vas, entre partout, réponds à tout. (“Mauvais sang”)

  (On the highways, on winter nights, without resting-place, or clothing, or bread, a voice squeezed my frozen heart: Weakness or strength: here you are, that’s strength. You know neither where you are going nor why, enter everywhere, respond to everything. [“Bad Blood”];

  (3) being unreliable and, above all, at odds with himself, but as a mode of assertive independence; (4) the cultivation of the dislocative and the interruptive. Looking back over these qualities, one might add that the readiness to start from scratch reveals itself in the shifting emphasis of his titles: while the 1869–71 poems are largely generated out of specific occasions or a will to (satiric) portraiture, retrospective and summarizing, the Illuminations (composed 1873–75?) are like leaps into differing kinds of experience, unprejudiced, uncompromising, with unpredictable outcomes: “Mystique” (“Mystical”), “Aube” (“Dawn”), “Barbare” (“Barbaric”). The unreflective harnessing of embodied concepts—“Derrière l’arête de droite la ligne des orients, des progrès” (Behind the ridge to the right the line of orients, of advances) (“Mystique”)—means that the passage between categories (abstract/concrete, common/proper) is always open, that this is a world of sudden adjustments of dimension, or of perceptual and existential capacity. But if it is unreflectiveness that allows these channels, these possibilities, to remain open, then any falling back into reflection, into stock-taking, may bring it all to nothing, to an artifice, to a system, to an exercise of will, to a hypocrisy. This is the labyrinthine territory that Une saison en enfer explores, the territory of the apologist and testamentary writer. This is the territory where being at odds with oneself is most clearly enacted: defiance, self-justification, scorn, self-derision, indignation, cut through by sudden bouts of frustrated impatience. But the Illuminations, it seems, provide a way out of this impasse: being at odds with oneself might resolve itself into a fruitful diversity, into cross-categorial and cross-generic nomadism, a condition in which different states of consciousness might not, after all, be reciprocally disqualifying.

  The fourth element of this recklessness—the dislocative and the interruptive—takes us in another direction. In Rimbaud’s revisions of Une saison en enfer one finds, among other things, a change in the punctuation, with an increase in the incidence of the dash. Rimbaud’s use of the dash has received consistent critical attention and has significance not as a tool to fulfill specific syntactical purposes, but rather as a signifier for the presiding mentality of whole texts. The dash has a dislocative function, inasmuch as it suggests sudden ruptures in psychic or perceptual levels or perspectives, inasmuch as it turns smooth discursive surfaces into faceted ones, inasmuch as, by its intimation of speed, it indicates unpredictable veerings of thought, or a will to get to a point. It does not necessarily interrupt the syntax of an ongoing sentence—it sometimes appears with other punctuation, sometimes not—but it does interrupt in the sense that it is a perceptual eruption that cannot be postponed or withstood:

  Une matinée couverte, en Juillet. Un goût de cendres vole dans l’air;—une odeur de bois suant dans l’âtre,—les fleurs rouies—le saccage des promenades—la bruine des canaux par les champs—pourquoi pas déjà les joujoux et l’encens? (“Phrases”)

  (An overcast morning, in July. A taste of ashes is borne on the air;—a smell of wood sweating in the hearth,—the retted flowers—the devastation of the walks—the misty drizzle of the canals across the fields—why not toys and incense indeed?) (“Phrases”)

  The dash, then, is like something injected into a text whose syntax would work perfectly well without it. And this something is like a vocal pressure, the writer’s bodily invasion of his own text, a manhandling of the written by the spoken, the insertion of a level of articulatory tension that the written is unaccustomed to. This articulatory tension is evidenced, too, in habits of ellipsis, in deictic words, in exclamation marks. Correspondingly, readers will feel that they are reading dangerously, by fissures and infills, reading a text whose significance is to be measured as much by its activity as its meaning.

  But if we respond to a strong oral presence in these texts, we must be careful not to make the wrong assumptions. In speaking of the pressures brought to bear by the speaker, we might assume that Rimbaud’s is a vocative world. Although these texts are not without their occasional second-person orientations, it would be truer to say that the second person is an outmoded poetic posture, waiting to be superseded by the third-person accusativity of the prose poem. This development is nowhere more apparent than in Rimbaud’s continuing use of the apostrophe. Apostrophe, as we find it in the poems of 1869–71 and 1872, perpetuates its rhetorical role of vocative invocation:

  —Ô buffet du vieux temps, tu sais bien des histoires

  (“Le Buffet”)

  (—O sideboard of the olden days, you have plenty of tales to tell)

  (“The Sideboard”)

  In the Illuminations, the apostrophic “Ô” of vocative address (Ô + noun) is still to be found. But this form of the apostrophe is always aspiring to accusative structures (Ô + definite article/possessive adjective/demonstrative adjective + noun): “Ô la face cendrée, l’écusson de crin, les bras de cristal!” (O the ashen face, the escutcheon of horsehair, the arms of crystal!) (“Ô la face cendrée …”); “Ô ses souffles, ses têtes, ses courses” (O his breaths, his heads, his careerings) (“Génie” / “Genie”); “Ô cette chaude matinée de février” (O this warm February morning) (“Ouvriers” / “Workers”). “Ô” expresses a self that wishes itself inside experience, not to assimilate and confine it, but to bathe in
it, as an independent (accusative) force. “Ô” has a projective aspect, is a desire for a sentient fullness, looking for future fulfillment.

  In a world such as this, it is difficult to know whether the adoption of prose is a defiant act of slumming it, a refusal of the bourgeois standard (poetry), or precisely the embrace of a medium that allows the miracle of the ultralinguistic to emerge from banality (brass that wakes up a bugle). In other words, is prose an assertion of identity (revolt) or an assertion of nonidentity (nonaffiliation, unformedness, despite forebears in the prose poem like Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire), or, above all, a recovered innocence? But in what senses an innocence? As the medium of a new language, a language unimpaired by the rhetorics, the aesthetics, the ideologies of verse making, a language permeated by a kind of unguardedness, a recklessness of the kind already described: “entre partout, réponds à tout” (enter everywhere, respond to everything) (“Mauvais sang”). Language releases a world in which nothing is given, no pattern is anticipated, no conventions are acceded to, and in which the poet must find his place, as autocratic creator and overwhelmed observer.

  It might seem risky to make some of the textual observations that I have made, particularly about punctuation, given that so few of Rimbaud’s texts (aside from Une saison en enfer and one or two early poems) were printed with any authorial oversight. Many of the manuscripts are careful fair copies, it is true, but problems of uncertain legibility and intention remain. But two things should be said about this textual “instability”: first, these texts are the only ones we have, and they are properly hedged about by scholarly caveats; second, it seems fitting to postulate that what might be regarded as inconsistencies, or doubtful or loose usage, are an integral part of that necessary linguistic flexibility by which one element might morph into another and by which perceptual states might be altered. We must not forget that Rimbaud is someone without a language (“même, quelle langue parlais-je?” (even, what language did I speak?) [“Mauvais sang”]) in search of a language (“to find a language” [letter to Demeny]), someone for whom the “disordering of all the senses” applies as much to language as to mind, for whom the vehicle of “l’hallucination simple” (the simple hallucination) is “l’hallucination des mots” (the hallucination of words) (“Délires II: Alchimie du verbe”). We must learn to read away from the known and the stable; we must be bold enough to inhabit linguistic delirium.