A Counterfactual Rimbaud
Daniel Barbiero
October 2024
Dominique Noguez
The Three Rimbauds
translated by Seth Whidden
Seagull Books
Do we need another Rimbaud? Now, even one hundred and fifty years after he stopped writing poetry? It’s a question his long afterlife keeps open. At the moment he ceased to be a poet around 1875, barely out of his teens, he reciprocally ceased to be a person and instead became a myth – or better, a blank screen onto which a myth or myths could be projected.
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has often been said to have been an enigma. And he certainly did seem to contain contradictions: dutiful schoolboy and juvenile blasphemer; poetic genius and surly rustic with the raw hands of a laundress (as per Mallarmé); ecstatic visionary and small businessman. Given all this, we might be tempted to skip over the usual question of what or who was the real Rimbaud and ask instead, was there ever a real Rimbaud? Was there only a “Rimbaud”? Was Rimbaud – or “Rimbaud” – ever only a simulacrum, to borrow a once-fashionable idea from Jean Baudrillard? Perhaps a second-phase simulacrum, one based an underlying reality which it represents in a distorting or obscuring manner: a kind of sign that simulates by dissimulating. Dissimulation there may be, but even in dissimulating, the simulation acknowledges the reality underlying it. The reality itself doesn’t go away. That there was a real Rimbaud underneath “Rimbaud,” that there was a concrete individual living out his individuality in the midst of his time, secreted within the myth – all of this is conceded. Yet it’s a concession that doesn’t give up the idea that the myth – the dissimulating simulation – has a powerful reality of its own.
The myth derives its power from the character and the circumstances of the historical person, who was apparently enigmatic enough to license attempts, some more speculative than others, to explain his motives in doing one thing or another, whether writing poetry of unsettling imagery or trading pelts, coffee, and guns in East Africa. We really don’t know what drove him, which is why fictional works about him can be written, and can be read with interest. Rimbaud himself had become something of a fictional or semi-fictional character by the time he disappeared into Africa in the 1880s, and arguably has been one ever since. Consequently, we can see him in whatever terms we find useful at any given time. As his biographer Graham Robb put it in the introduction to his book, Rimbaud – or “Rimbaud” – has had a “posthumous career as Symbolist, Surrealist, Beat poet, student revolutionary, rock lyricist, gay pioneer, and inspired drug-user.” A true, but selective cast of characters; discreetly overlooked by the myth is Rimbaud the man who in his youth always returned to his mother’s farm and in many respects never really stopped being his mother’s son. And now with The Three Rimbauds, Dominique Noguez’s inventive reimagining of Rimbaud’s life, we have a new simulacrum, a counterfactual Rimbaud who never was but possibly could have been, related in a parody of a learned biography.
Noguez (1942-2019), scholar of literature and experimental film, member of the Collège de pataphysique, author of a study of Michel Houellebecq, was no stranger to mordant wit and well-placed to create a parody of a scholarly life of Rimbaud. In fact the work originally appeared in French in 1986 as the first of a series Noguez called “études plus ou moins savantes” – more or less learned studies. As for the more learned part, Noguez in 1991 produced a critical edition of A Season in Hell and Illuminations. As translator Seth Whidden notes in his Foreword, in The Three Rimbauds Noguez was able to take his erudition and deftly combine it with outright fabrication. The result is a subtly comic twisting of the Rimbaud myth and of the intellectual and even cultish edifice that grew up around it, which at the same time provides a critical view into the man and poet underneath it all.
For all his creative setting of the facts on their side, Noguez give us a Rimbaud from a possible world only slightly, and yet significantly, divergent from our own. In addition to the two Rimbauds of our world – the inspired poet-rebel who turned his back on poetry and the money motivated merchant who died in 1891 – Noguez concocts a third: a Rimbaud who once again takes up literature, embraces the Catholic Church late in life, and lives well into the 1930s.
We first meet this third Rimbaud in 1930, as he is being presented to the Académie française by Paul Valery. In Noguez’s alternative world, Rimbaud hadn’t abandoned writing sometime around 1875; while in Africa he wrote a series of sonnets and later, after his surreptitious return to France in 1891, wrote what comes to be taken as his masterwork, the novel African Nights. (Interestingly, Paul Duffy’s fictional Rimbaud in Disaster Was My God also writes poetry while in Africa, but ends up burning it as he leaves the continent for France near the end of his life.) When Rimbaud returns to France in 1893 he becomes a literary figure once again, but now his reputation rests mainly on his new work rather than on the poetry of his adolescence. Playing a significant role in the fictive Rimbaud’s life is the Catholic poet, playwright, and diplomat Paul Claudel, who in real life wrote a foreword to an edition of Rimbaud’s collected works in 1912, arguing that Rimbaud was “un mystique à l’état sauvage” – a mystic in the wild. (Claudel was himself an unbeliever until, at age eighteen, he both experienced an epiphany in the cathedral of Notre Dame and found in Rimbaud’s Illuminations the revelation of a theocentric cosmos.) Noguez’s Rimbaud in fact marries Claudel’s widowed younger sister Louise in 1907, not long after his mother, the formidable Mme. Rimbaud, dies. It’s his first marriage and not a particularly happy one on account of his emotional indifference; a few months after Louise’s death he marries a young Enid Starkie. Shockingly for the man who as a teen carved “Merde à Dieu” on a park bench in Charleville, he returns to the Church in 1925. At the time of his death in 1937 he is an established literary figure who was rumored to have been considered for the Nobel Prize in literature.
The Three Rimbauds isn’t written as a novel but rather as a parody of a scholarly literary biography. It divides roughly in two, with the first half consisting of the biography and the second half consisting of an exegesis of Rimbaud’s real and fictional writings. As Whidden notes in his foreword, Noguez was motivated to write the short piece – it’s little more than fifty pages long – in part as a poke at the vast volume of scholarly dissections of the first two Rimbauds. Hence Noguez meticulously cites primary sources, quotes from Rimbaud’s correspondence, and provides close readings of Rimbaud’s work with an emphasis on demonstrating the continuities between the early and late writings. Some of the quotes in the book are from historical documents as they actually exist, some are from historical documents that Noguez has added to or otherwise modified, and some are entirely invented. But no matter how far from the truth Noguez deliberately strays, there is always a residue of the historical Rimbaud at the heart of his fictive simulacrum. Whidden’s thorough footnotes are extremely helpful in pointing out what is fact and what is not, and in providing explanatory context to the events Noguez describes or concocts.
Noguez’s slyly humorous method of weaving together the real and the imaginary makes the book a delight to read. It contains a good number of inside jokes. To pick one example, Enid Starkie, the imaginary Rimbaud’s second wife, in real life was a Rimbaud scholar and the author of Rimbaud in Abyssinia, a biography whose allegation that Rimbaud was involved in the slave trade in Africa threw a shadow over his reputation. The allegation was later disproven. Similarly, his account of Rimbaud’s fraught relations with the Surrealist group captures the sometimes comically absurd and poisonous politics of Parisian literary life between the wars. In our world – the world in which A Season in Hell and Illuminations are Rimbaud’s final known literary works – the Surrealists, on the basis of his youth and the rebelliousness of his art, had elevated him to a primary position in their pantheon, with André Breton tellingly describing him in The Anthology of Black Humour as a “veritable god of puberty.” To be sure, the Surrealists had reservations about Rimbaud’s later life and qualified their enthusiasm for his poetry by regretting that it had not been written in a way that would make theological interpretations impossible. So what would the notoriously anti-clerical Breton and his associates do with a Rimbaud who had actually converted? In Noguez’s counterfactual world the Surrealists still esteem the Rimbaud of 1871 and 1872 – as well as the Rimbaud of the fictive African Nights and the equally fictive sonnets of 1886-1888 and “futurist” work of 1899-1910. Rimbaud even maintains good personal relations with the group until 1925, when the appearance of Antonin Artaud’s “Address to the Pope” in the third number of La Révolution surréaliste in April 1925 strains the relationship, and finally breaks with them that July over their attack on Claudel in the “Open Letter to Mr. Paul Claudel, French Ambassador to Japan,” which probably was authored by Breton. Both the address to the pope and the letter to Claudel are historical; what isn’t historical is the sharp attack on Rimbaud that Louis Aragon supposedly published in Les Nouvelles littéraires on 18 July 1925,which Noguez “quotes.” Noguez’s parody of Aragon’s early polemical style is pointedly accurate, as is his dig at the Surrealists’ dogma-driven excommunications and reconciliations. Breton and Rimbaud, Noguez assures us, patched things up in 1935.
The central enigma at the heart of the Rimbaud myth, the ur-event that arguably made the creation of a myth necessary, was Rimbaud’s supposed abandonment of poetry around the age of twenty. And not just abandoning it, but seeming to renounce it in a freely chosen act with existential implications. To stop writing poetry in the way he purportedly did, Rimbaud chose himself as one who had taken verbal expression to its limit and saw the emptiness of whatever lay beyond it. (Whether this actually was the case or whether instead he had simply outgrown the need to write poetry really doesn’t matter to the myth.) Abandoning poetry was the fundamental choice through which he defined himself and simultaneously negated the possibility of poetry; it was a project of its own that reached back into his past and lent it a poignant meaning from his future by revealing the poetry to represent a desperate, because ultimately undone, gesture of revolt against things as they are – against Ananke, or necessity, as Benjamin Fondane described it. For Camus the existential implications were clear: Rimbaud’s life and work expressed nothing less than the “struggle between the will to be and the desire for annihilation.” A decisive abandonment of poetry would resolve this struggle in the most dramatic form a resolution could take.
For Noguez to have Rimbaud return to writing poetry is just as subversive of the Rimbaud myth as having him return to the Church. But in the former case if perhaps not in the latter, Noguez’s simulacrum of Rimbaud probably is close to the reality that would have been had the historical Rimbaud lived. For Rimbaud’s turning away from writing may not have been the abrupt abandonment so necessary to the myth. Robb reports that Verlaine thought that Rimbaud had continued to write poems after his time in Stuttgart in early 1875, and that his sister Isabelle also thought that Rimbaud had continued writing. Robb also notes that Rimbaud’s employer in Harrar, Alfred Bardey, thought that Rimbaud planned to take up literature again after he had, in Bardey’s words, “amassed a sufficient fortune.” And Bardey’s housekeeper claimed that Rimbaud “wrote a great deal” and was working on what Robb surmises was an illustrated book.
Even with the extended literary life Noguez has given his Rimbaud, the central problem of Rimbaud’s life – the continuity, if any, between the early poetry and the later career – remains. It’s just that now it’s played out on a different field and with a new body of “evidence.” Instead of consisting of an effort to reconcile the rebel poet with the petit-bourgeois trader, the game involves trying to reconcile the rebel poet with the author of the post-conversion The Black Gospel. Noguez sets the game up, and plays it well. The Three Rimbauds contains in-depth literary analyses that ultimately reveal a serious point underneath the parodies, pastiches, and in-jokes. Noguez suggests that the real Rimbaud – the historical person, the concrete existent around whom an elaborate and enduring mythical structure coalesced – lived his apparently contradictory life on the basis of an underlying and consistent existential anxiety – an “insomnia,” as Noguez calls it, borrowing the term from a fictitious account of a visit to Rimbaud in December 1936, near the end of the poet’s life. Noguez finds hints of this “irreparably tormented man” in A Season in Hell, which he reads closely, and argues that “what in 1873 is condensed in the few pages of a single text is then developed, orchestrated, from one major text to another.” One could argue that for the (real) Rimbaud who died in 1891, that same torment played itself out in the wanderings and undertakings of his post-literary life.
In The Rebel, Camus claimed that about Rimbaud “everything has been said, and even more, unfortunately.” In parodying the scholarly edifice that has grown up around Rimbaud Noguez on the one hand might seem to agree. And yet at the same time his fictive simulacrum of Rimbaud, in giving us a plausible Rimbaud who wasn’t but who could have been, does open up a new perspective from which to understand the actual Rimbaud who was. His Rimbaud is a simulation that, for all its inventiveness, never loses contact with reality. In any event it’s hard to disagree with his conclusion that “Rimbaud studies have a bright future ahead of them.” As Whidden declared in his own biography of Rimbaud, there will “always be enough Rimbaud for all of us.”
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
Link to Daniel Barbiero’s, As Within, so Without →
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