"Bah! faisons toutes les grimaces imaginables" 'So what! let us make all conceivable grimaces'.¹ Rimbaud projected himself in a series of roles that allowed him to act out a multiple relationship with the world. Self-reflexive images, warring affections, refashioned myths: his poetry is complex representation.

The element of play was no doubt central to such a venture as it had been for the schoolboy who shone by his Latin hexameters and who later pastiched the Romantics and Parnassians. What could give more pleasure than to write these variations in which he was visible and invisible like a magician: "Ecoutez … J'ai tous les talents!—Il n'y a personne ici et il y a quelqu'un … Je suis caché et je ne le suis pas" 'Listen! … I have all talents! There is no one here and there is someone … I am hidden and not hidden'.² He could take each part while keeping a distance from any single one. Nevertheless we know that his poetry was not only play, for it resulted in one of the truly tragic expressions of literature that confronts futility, anguish, madness, death. The work shows a coherent ambition by which he rebelled against fatal constraints; and the tensions were all the more violent as he grew more impatient of repression.

The theatrical enterprise found mature focus in 1871. The Drunken Boat tropes past, present, future, its voice being that of a visionary plenitude which is forced to discover narrower limits. No single unilinear reading—for instance, a recently proposed Marxist scheme³—can do justice to a poem whose five parts image forth the antagonisms of strength and weakness: "Je ne puis plus, baigné de vos langueurs, ô lames …"

This is the lucid pattern that Rimbaud amplifies in the several voices of his later poems. The Inventor of "Voyelles" writes the language of anger and penitence, brilliance and shadow, silence and noise; the Memorialist of "Mémoire" poignantly moves between twin flowers; the Ingénu of "Michel et Christine", solemn yet tender, concludes his poem on the uncertain postulate of naive hope. Carrying these dramatizations still further into the formal freedoms of the prose poem, the Illuminations develops with every text a manner, a style, a highly individual dramatic action. Rimbaud commanded his various modes ("J'ai essayé d'inventer de nouvelles fleurs, de nouveaux astres, de nouvelles chairs, de nouveaux langages" 'I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages')⁴ by which he could each time realize himself provisionally. Thus the poet pronounces the admirable monologue of Self-aware Creator, Critic and Ironist; the Floodmaker intones the litany of rupture and possible recovery; the Storyteller presents the despot who finds and loses what he seeks; the Dreamer is torn between contradictory dreams; the Agonist chooses to go to the depths of suffering; the Lover lives at one and the same time by music and death, gravity and wit. A theatre is animated by the protean self as it struggles with final dualities.

Yet what of Une Saison en enfer, about which Rimbaud said: "Ma vie dépend de ce livre" 'My life hangs on this book'?⁵ The manuscripts and other indices show that it does not postdate the Illuminations, as was originally thought on the combined authority of Rimbaud's sister and Paul Claudel. The two works were no doubt written in some part simultaneously. But, such being the case, how are we to reconcile their apparent contradictions? The interpretation that saw Une Saison en enfer as Rimbaud's account of his farewell to poetry and his salute to a life of action had been at least intellectually satisfying.

I would wish to propose that the very simultaneity of the texts underlines their theatrical character. Each answers each: whereas the Illuminations is fragmented, Une Saison en enfer is unitary; and whereas the former tends to the universal, the latter explores the intimate. The descent into hell answers the Illuminations, which answers it. Rimbaud, enacts yet again, in a new way, the absolute and the conditional of his thought.

The presence of various models has been canvased, including the Gnostic Gospels, the Æneid, the Divine Comedy and Nerval's Aurélia, each of which is a commanding treatment of the scheme of katabasis. It seems to me, however, that the essential intertext is Les Fleurs du mal, no longer considered with respect to individual poems of the collection such as "Le Voyage" or "Correspondances" or "Spleen" but considered rather as an undivided whole. Rimbaud responds to Baudelaire's large compass by his own long multifaceted confession placed under the sign of Satan, a crafted book which shows from one end to the other—to recall Baudelaire's own words—"the agitation of the Spirit in the throes of Evil" ('l'agitation de l'Esprit dans le Mal'). The soul struggles inside a Christian worldview of sin and salvation from which it is unable to break free, and which takes it to the depths of despair before allowing a final glimpsed resolution. All is ordered according to a total rhythm—six parts and a liminary poem in Les Fleurs du mal, eight parts and a preface in Une Saison en enfer—that has its full resonance solely when read in sequence from start to finish. How, indeed, could Rimbaud, having faced immediate death by Verlaine's revolver in July 1873, not have turned to the poet who had shown poetry, from one end of Les Fleurs du mal to another, to be here and now a matter of life and death? Could he, too, not write a confession that would both indict and engage himself? No less than Les Fleurs du mal, Une Saison en enfer is the poem of the crisis of an individual soul, which also expresses a society ("Maîtres et ouvriers, tous paysans, ignobles" 'Masters and workers, all peasants, ignoble') and a culture ("Pas une famille d'Europe que je ne connaisse" 'Not one European family that I do not know") that have been subjected to spiritual, emotional and economic alienation ("Quel siècle à mains!—Je n'aurai jamais ma main" 'What a century of hands!—I shall never have my hand').

The constant lucidity of Rimbaud's art of dramatic composition has been evident from our analyses. Yet Une Saison en enfer brings this mastery to new fruition. The anguish is acute which translates the progression from a historically determined ill chance ("Mauvais Sang") to present passion ("Nuit de l'enfer"), from the companion's suffering ("Délires I") to the poet's overweening ambition and self-destructiveness ("Délires II"), from exotic dream ("L'Impossible") to illusory labor ("L'Eclair"), from nostalgia ("Matin") to autumnal hope ("Adieu"). The binary pattern, through an unswerving rhythm, spells out the vision in its grand design. At the same time, the prose weaves a furious dialectic with every sentence.

The preface begins on inverted commas that are never closed. They designate an actor who speaks his role in two separate tones and with respect to two separate moments in time—"jadis" in the first seven paragraphs, "tout dernièrement" in the second four. Turning with nostalgia to the almost forgotten past, he evokes a graduated self-violence: present and imperfect tenses are replaced by perfect and historical; beauty, justice, hope, joy are denied; suffering and madness are part of a scenario in which the self bites the executioners' rifles and grovels in the mud. The imagination and diction are passionately theatrical.

Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient.

Un soir, j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux.—Et je l'ai trouvée amère.—Et je l'ai injuriée.

Je me suis armé contre la justice.
Je me suis enfui. O sorcières, ô misère, ô haine, c'est à vous que mon trésor a été confié!

Je parvins à faire s'évanouir dans mon esprit toute l'espérance humaine. Sur toute joie pour l'étrangler j'ai fait le bond sourd de la bête féroce.

J'ai appelé les bourreaux pour, en périssant, mordre la crosse de leurs fusils. J'ai appelé les fléaux, pour m'étouffer avec le sable, le sang. Le malheur a été mon dieu. Je me suis allongé dans la boue. Je me suis séché à l'air du crime. Et j'ai joué de bons tours à la folie.

Et le printemps m'a apporté l'affreux rire de l'idiot.⁶

Once, if my memory serves me, my life was a banquet at which all hearts opened, all wines flowed.

One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees.—And I found her bitter.—And I reviled her.

I took arms against justice.

I fled. O witches, O poverty, O hatred, it was to you that my treasure was entrusted!

I managed to make all human hope vanish from my mind. Upon every joy, to strangle it, I made the noiseless leap of the wild beast.

I summoned the executioners so as to bite their gun-butts as I lay dying. I summoned scourges so as to suffocate with sand, with blood. Misery was my god. I stretched out in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played fine tricks on madness.

And spring brought me the idiot's frightful laughter.

Qualis artifex pereo: the self articulates its Baudelairean anguish. Alliteration continues from start to finish; a set of antagonisms gauges the emotions (sweetness/bitterness, treasure/poverty, joy/ferocity, laughter/terror); syntactic parellelisms and phonetic insistence tell of fatal decline. The second part, however, moves in a wholly different way and, instead of developing narrative intensity, reacts to what has been said. All is now treated with black humor ("le dernier couac!"), cool aplomb ("j'ai rêvé"), ironic gratitude ("de si aimables pavots"), assumed affection ("cher Satan"), false baroque ("une prunelle moins irritée"). The now anti-Baudelairean speaker follows a dramatic—that is, nondescriptive and noninstructive—mode to please this demon who, on one legendary occasion, became a talking serpent. He will give back to Satan, without any self-indulgence, what is properly Satan's.

Or, tout dernièrement m'étant trouvé sur le point de faire le dernier couac! j'ai songé à rechercher la clef du festin ancien, où je reprendrais peut-être appétit.

La charité est cette clef.—Cette inspiration prouve que j'ai eêvé!

"Tu resteras hyène, etc…. ", se récrie le démon qui me couronna de si aimables pavots. "Gagne la mort avec tous tes appétits, et ton égoïsme et tous les péchés capitaux."

Ah! j'en ai trop pris:—Mais, cher Satan, je vous en conjure, une prunelle moins irritée! et en attendant les quelques petites lâchetés en retard, vous qui aimez dans l'écrivain l'absence des facultés descriptives ou instructives, je vous détache ces quelques hideux feuillets de mon carnet de damné.

Now, just lately, finding myself about to make a last croak! I thought of looking for the key to the old banquet, where I might perhaps recover my appetite.

Charity is that key.—That inspiration proves I have been dreaming!

"You will remain a hyena, etc. … ", protests the demon who wreathed me with such pleasant poppies. "Earn your death with all your appetites, and your selfishness and all the deadly sins."

Ah! I have suffered too much:—But, my dear Satan, I beg you, a gentler eye! and in the expectation of a few more small cowardly acts that are late to bloom, I tear out for you—you who love a writer's lack of descriptive or instructive talents—these few horrible pages from my notebook of a damned soul.

The lines bring a reversal of attitudes like those crucial reversals that so suddenly break into "Le Bateau ivre" and the other great Rimbaud works we have read: the poem turns back on itself in an act of self-reflection. Anguish loses its sting for a speaker who can announce his new resolution while predicting some further irresoluteness on his part, and who can play the devil by voicing a threat ("Tu resteras hyène …") or a temptation ("Gagne la mort …"). The preface thus ironically—such tragic irony is the nexus of Une Saison en enfer—places damnation under the sign of salvation: it puts the divided sensibility and intellect on stage according to a foreshadowed plot.

The first of the eight parts, "Mauvais Sang", has eight sections of widely varying lengths ranging from five paragraphs to ten. It begins with a mock-heroic genealogy, passes to a poignant dream of happiness, the awareness of inescapable solitude, an imagined primitive nature, a future conversion, an evocation of fresh innocence yet the farce of such innocence, finally a vision of martyrdom. Nothing is more agitated than this self caught between its hope and fear, whose only constancy is self-contradiction. Yet if the opening is matter-of-fact ("J'ai de mes ancêtres gaulois l'œil bleu blanc" 'From my Gaulish ancestors I have my blue-white eyes'), the other sections trace a mounting passion like that of a monologuist who exhausts every note of his register, from poignancy to hallucination: "Si j'avais des antécédents à un point quelconque de l'histoire de France! …", "Le sang revient! …", "On ne part pas …", "Encore tout enfant, j'admirais le forçat intraitable sur qui se referme toujours le bagne …", "Les blancs débarquent. Le canon! …", "L'ennui n'est plus mon amour …", "Assez! Voici la punition …"

After this rapid succession of conflicting passages, "Nuit de l'enfer" is a single long piece that enunciates hellfire. Across twenty carefully ordered paragraphs, the soul acts out its dual consciousness of being damned yet potentially saved. For, by a dramatic irony parallel to that of the preface, damnation and salvation are felt together like simultaneous torture and blessing. Whereas "Mauvais Sang" proceeded by fragments arranged in a temporal sequence, these lines move in an undivided moment: "J'ai avalé une fameuse gorgée de poison.—Trois fois béni le conseil qui m'est arrivé" 'I swallowed a famous mouthful of poison.—Thrice blessed be the good counsel that came to me'. The self gives us a drama in which error implies truth as hell implies heaven: "Des erreurs qu'on me souffle, magies, parfums faux, musiques puériles.—Et dire que je tiens la vérité, que je vois la justice …" 'Errors that are whispered to me, magic, false perfumes, childish music.—And to think that I possess the truth, that I perceive justice … '; again: "Marie! Sainte-Vierge!—Horreur de ma bêtise" 'Mary! Holy Virgin!—The horror of my stupidity'. Language works against itself as goodness is juxtaposed to selfishness, ecstasy to night-mare, miraculous powers (the self will be a charitable Christ: "Tous, venez,—même les petits enfants, que je vous console …" 'All of you, come—even the little children, let me comfort you … ') to dejection, pride to dissolution. Poetic force derives from these contradictory exclamatives, but also from the immobile nature of a soliloquy burning with the flame of paradox, which introduces in the first lines a delirious vision—"Voyez comme le feu se relève" 'See how the fire rises up again'—and closes on the symmetrical counterpart of this vision—"C'est le feu qui se relève avec son damné" 'It is fire that rises up again with its damned soul'.

The third and fourth sections, "Délires I" and "Délires II", break into the sequence with a radical modification of the speaking voice. In the former the role is that of a man/woman, both companion ("un compagnon d'enfer") and foolish virgin ("vierge folle")—a male playing a female part, who construes all self-references in the feminine ("la plus triste de vos servantes . . perdue … soûle … impure … veuve … jalouse … soumise … folle …"). The new voicing distances the immediate crisis, so that what is tragic in "Mauvais Sang" and "Nuit de l'enfer" is here treated with a measure of light relief; but this lightness is relative, for it serves finally to reveal still more desperately the failure of the demonic project when seen from an external vantage point.

Thus past anguish is transmuted into a mixture of comedy and pathos. The pseudowoman who has put her destiny in the hands of the Spouse uses an unintentionally farcical language that figures Verlaine in his religious nostalgia yet carnal weakness ("Je suis née soumise à Lui!—L'autre peut me battre maintenant!" "I was born subject to Him!—The other one can beat me now!'), his self-abasement yet pleasure in self-abasement ("Que de larmes! Et que de larmes encore plus tard, j'espère!" 'How many tears! And how many more tears later, I hope!'), his sexuality yet censorship of sexual identity ("O mes amies! … non, pas mes amies …" 'O my girlfriends! … no, not my girlfriends … '), his sadness yet indulgence in melancholy ("Enfin, faisons cette confidence, quitte à la répéter vingt fois—aussi morne, aussi insignifiante!" 'So let us make this confession, while being ready to repeat it twenty times over—just as melancholy, just as insignificant!'), his true naiveté yet self-conscious cult of naiveté ("moi, moi, la pauvre âme" 'I, I, the poor soul'). For the foolish virgin, God exists and there is no quarrel, but He can be postponed for more pressing needs. That such a profile corresponds to the "Pauvre Lélian" of Verlaine's verse and prose is clear: no less than the nervous rhythms and sinuous phrasing, a precise vocabulary signals the author of Poèmes saturniens and Romances sans paroles: "triste", "tristement", "tristesses", "le Paradis de la tristesse", "chagrin", "douceur", "sagesse" …

Yet the goal is surely not to write a portrait of Verlaine as such but to judge the madness of an enterprise that involves both the Infernal Spouse and his companion. He who sought to save himself and others, to go beyond reality, to change life, is shown with his shortcomings. The woman declares both her own torment and the less than noble contradictions of the Spouse, whose words are mimed in yet another voice of misogyny, cruelty, terror, charity, sadness, indignation, mockery, gentleness. The Mad Virgin sees the sham, and forgives; trembles, and follows; imagines, and despairs; admires, and deems herself unworthy; twice says "Je te comprends", and does not understand; and although she calls him devilish, she expects that he may ascend one day divinely into heaven in some messianic assumption. We are held by a suffering that is unfolded in its hopelessness, all the more so since we recognize before we are told—as we shall be told in "Délires II"—the self-destructiveness that underlies the Spouse's ambition to save the world. By dramatic irony, we see more than the woman herself sees, since she does not comprehend the gulf. The last words, of the section ("Drôle de ménage!" 'Funny couple!') put the crisis with terrible understatement.

"Délires II" points up ludically from the start the changed voice ("A moi" 'Now it's my turn'): a freshly poised self, direct, calmly analytical, describes the ways it has sought to achieve verbal alchemy. In a controlled temporal order ("Depuis longtemps je me vantais … J'aimais … Je rêvais … je croyais … J'inventai …"), the imperfect tense of habit becomes the past definite of event, just as pride gives way to invention—"J'inventai la couleur des voyelles!" 'I invented the color of vowels!'—and dreams of invention—"je me flattai d'inventer un verbe poétique accessible, un jour ou l'autre, à tous les sens" 'I flattered myself that I was inventing a poetic language that would one day or other be accessible to all the senses'. Moving forward like an intellectual autobiography, the narrative places the writing of "Voyelles" in the line of a lucid undertaking. "Ce fut d'abord une étude" 'It was first of all an investigation'. Nevertheless, at this point, the monologue is interrupted by the first of seven poems that appear in forms different in each case from those of other manuscripts. Rimbaud gives us edited texts as if he had taken pains to fit them to his argument. For if the commentary follows a plot ("histoire"), the poems may be said to constitute a dramatic progression. In this itinerarium mentis or spiritual chantefable⁷ the first two pieces are vertigos ("Je fixais des vertiges") after the fashion of Poe's Malëstrom or House of Usher or Tell-tale Heart, although for Rimbaud the whirlpool's center is the soul.

Loin des oiseaux, des troupeaux, des villageoises,
Que buvais-je, à genoux dans cette bruyère
Entourée de tendres bois de noisetiers,
Dans un brouillard d'après-midi tiède et vert?

Far from birds, herds, village-maids, / what was I drinking on my knees in that heath / surrounded by tender woods of hazel-trees, / in a warm green afternoon fog?

We read, written in the rare hendecasyllabic meter, a poem that tells of unfathomed and unfathomable thirst in the midst of an abundant nature—heather, hazel trees, warm green vapor. The interrogatives, the meter, the negatives and implied negatives unsettle expectations, trope uncertainty ("Je faisais une louche enseigne d'auberge" 'I was an ambiguous inn sign'). Equivocalness reaches a climax, which is totally swept aside in a broad vision of storm and sky.

—Un orage vint chasser le ciel. Au soir
L'eau des bois se perdait sur les sables vierges,
Le vent de Dieu jetait des glaçons aux mares;
Pleurant, je voyais de l'or—et ne pus boire.—

—A storm came to cleanse the sky. In the evening / water from the woods spilt down on virgin sands, / God's wind cast icy blocks at the ponds; Weeping, I saw gold—and could not drink.

Warmth gives way to bitter cold, afternoon to evening, as if God were chastizing nature. The thirst for the absolute ends in frustrated desire.

The second poem answers this vertigo by a vertigo of a different kind: not solitude but love, not afternoon but morning, not sadness but happiness. A festive world blesses the lovers and, at the same time, as if from an overflowing heart, blesses the workers who recover their spirits (playfully, "eau-de-vie") by the intercession of the star of love, and who rejoice in the prospect of a future sea-change.

A quatre heures du matin, l'été,
Le sommeil d'amour dure encore.
Sous les bocages s'évapore
L'odeur du soir fêté.

Là-bas, dans leur vaste chantier
Au soleil des Hespérides,
Déjà s'agitent—en bras de chemise—
Les Charpentiers.

Dans leurs Déserts de mousse, tranquilles,
Ils préparent les lambris précieux Où la ville
Peindra de faux cieux.

O, pour ces Ouvriers charmants
Sujets d'un roi de Babylone,
Vénus! quitte un instant les Amants
Dont l'âme est en couronne.

O Reine des Bergers,
Porte aux travailleurs l'eau-de-vie,
Que leurs forces soient en paix
En attendant le bain dans la mer à midi.

At four O 'clock in the morning, in summer, / love's sleep still lasts. / Beneath the groves evaporates / the smell of the festive evening.

Down there, in their vast workshop / in the sunlight of the Hesperides, / already in their shirtsleeves—the Carpenters / are active.

In their mossy Deserts, calmly, / they ready the costly panels / on which the city / will paint false skies.

O, for these magical Workers / subjects of a Babylonian King, / Venus! leave for a moment the Lovers / whose souls are wreathed.

O Queen of Shepherds, / bring to the workmen the water-of-life, / may their strength be at peace / while they wait to bathe in the sea at Midday.

The self and legendary nature are held in a dream, sustained by rhythms that do not count their numbers.

Prose intervenes to record the continuing alchemy of and by the word, which is this experiment in self-transformation. But verse soon returns, this time to capture the insouciance of caterpillars and moles. "Chanson de la plus haute tour" expresses, again in song form, a vagueness as undirected as nature, a simplicity as effortless as prayer, for thirst has become revolt against all conscious application.

qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.

J'ai tant fait patience
Qu'à jamais j'oublie.
Craintes et souffrances
Aux cieux sont parties.
Et la soif malsaine
Obscurcit mes veines.
Qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.

Let it come, let it come, / the time you will cherish.

I have been so patient / that forever I forget. / Fears and sufferings / have gone to the sky. / And unhealthy thirst / darkens my veins.

Let it come, let it come, / the time you will cherish.

Two earlier versions read: "Ah! que le temps vienne / Où les cœurs s'éprennent" 'Ah! let the time come / when hearts fall in love', which is no less melodious than the final version but more concrete. "Temps" will replace "cœur", and the hypothetical subjunctive will replace the possible indicative; for it is precisely such weightlessness that is at this point the goal of Une Saison en enfer.

The search for unreason is brought to a high point as the poet turns to images of devastation: the world must be "bombarded", "pulverized", "oxidized", "dissolved". Two poems treat the theme of bitter consumption in complementary fashion, the first projecting a violence that seeks to reduce reality to nothingness and adopting as it goes the phonetic and semantic insistence of nonsensical children's rounds:

Mangez les cailloux qu'on brise,
Les vieilles pierres d'églises;
Les galets des vieux déluges,
Pains semés dans les vallées grises.

Eat the broken pebbles, / the old church stones; / the shingles from old floods, / loaves strewn in the gray valleys.

the second recalling Gautier in its Parnassian emphasis, yet signifying the wish, no longer to consume, but to be consumed.

Que je dorme! que je bouille
Aux autels de Salomon.
Le bouillon court sur la rouille,
Et se mêle au Cédron.

Let me sleep! let me boil / on the altars of Solomon. / The broth flows on the rust /and mingles with the Kedron.

The references call up a large space and time that merges with legend, like the self that merges with sleep, broth with river. The twin orgies—active and passive—carry no joy, however, so that we must wait until the following poem, one of Rimbaud's most extraordinary, in which sea and sun, day and night, concrete and abstract combine in an ecstatic sequence. Hope no longer exists, since eternity is achieved here and now.

Elle est retrouvée!
Quoi? l'éternité.
C'est la mer mêlée
Au soleil.

Mon âme éternelle,
Observe ton vœu
Malgré la nuit seule
Et le jour en feu.

Donc tu te dégages
Des humains suffrages,

Des communs élans!
Tu voles selon …

—Jamais l'espérance.
Pas d'orietur.
Science et patience,
Le supplice est sûr.

Plus de lendemain,
Braises de satin,
Votre ardeur
Est le devoir.

Elle est retrouvée!
—Quoi?—I'Eternité.
C'est la mer mêlée
Au soleil.

It is found again! / What? eternity. / It is the sea mingling / with the sun.

My eternal soul, /follow your wish / despite lonely night / and fiery day.

So you free yourself / from human wills, / from common passions! / You fly at your whim …

—Never a hope. / No desire. / Science and patience, / the punishment is sure.

No tomorrow, /satin embers, / your present ardor / is your duty.

It is found again! / What? Eternity. / It is the sea mingling / with the sun.

The meter is pentasyllable, although broken by three trisyllables and a tetrasyllable in a rapid movement that Claudel might well describe by his favorite Zen term "Ah! awareness" or ahité: the self escapes from time to eternity in the way sea fuses with sun, Christian expectancy ("espérance" "orietur") with immediate experience. The fire metaphor ("soleil", "feu", "braises") becomes internalized as the poet's only responsibility and goal ("Votre ardeur / Est le devoir"), which rejects laborious science and long-suffering patience. It is the mystical song of eternity possessed.

Yet happiness—"le Bonheur"—is taken up in the last poem in quite different terms. Again the meter is light, with ten seven-syllable lines arranged in rhyming couplets; but a rhythmic counterpoint is introduced by four hexasyllables which catch the tenderly nostalgic note of an unexplained lovesong—"O saisons, ô châteaux"—like a fragment from Gérard de Nerval's "Chansons et Légendes du Valois".⁸ Answer is made to the previous poem by the sudden apprehension of loss. If the first, second and third pieces of the sequence treat the motif of thirst as frustration, then fulfillment, then bitter rejection of the world, and the fourth and fifth treat hunger as cruel consumption of external nature and the inner self, the last two present the contrasting images of flight as eternity, then—here—as mortality of the heart.

O saisons, ô châteaux!
Quelle âme est sans défauts?

J'ai fait la magique étude
Du bonheur, que nul n'élude.

Salut à lui, chaque fois
Que chante son coq gaulois.

Ah! je n'aurai plus d'envie:
II s'est chargé de ma vie.

Ce charme a pris âme et corps
Et dispersé les efforts.

O saisons, ô châteaux!

L'heure de sa fuite, hélas!
Sera l'heure du trépas.

O saisons, ô châteaux!

O seasons, O castles! / What soul is without stain? / I have pursued the magical study / of happiness, that no man avoids. / Hail to it, each time / the Gallic cock crows. /Ah! no longer shall I want: it has assumed my life. / This charm has become body and soul / and dispersed all toil. / O seasons, O castles! / The hour of its flight, alas! / will be the hour of death. / O seasons, O castles!

The fragile matter of song recalls the whole sequence of "Délires II"—study, pleasure, dissolution, death. At the same time, enlarging the drama to universal dimensions ("qu'aucun n'élude"), it announces the failure of all future endings. The conclusion is, however, immediately ironized by the poet who speaks with hindsight: "Cela s'est passé. Je sais aujourd'hui saluer la beauté" 'That is over and done with. Today I can greet beauty'. From the present he deflates the past with confidence, for he believes that he has emerged from the burden of remorse as he had fore-told in the preface. The drama he has played in life and literature would seem to be over. Yet this we are unable wholly to accept since there has been no resolution of any clear kind, so that if all may be right, all may still be terribly wrong. In the four remaining sections of Une Saison en enfer anguish will not cease, the soul being in constant jeopardy. The performance has not come to a close.

With "L'Impossible" the poem becomes a monologue of the abstract mind emblematic of Western culture. The confident declaration at the end of "Délires II" opens the way for reason which, finding the failure of reason, nevertheless affirms as it goes: "J'ai eu raison … J'ai eu raison … Je m'explique …" The self will return not to past wanderings that proved all too deceptive ("Quelle sottise c'était …"), or to more recent experiences of the venal or puerile ways of society ("Le monde! les marchands, les naïfs!"), but to Oriental wisdom. The Orient here provides Rimbaud with an imaginative pole of knowledge beyond knowledge: "sagesse"—the word occurs four times—would appear to offer an escape from Christian guilt and Western stagnation ("Les marais occidentaux!"). The poverty of religion, nationalism, middle-class conventions is associated with Christianity, since M. Prudhomme—the epitome of the nineteenth-century French bourgeois—"est né avec le Christ" 'was born at the same time as Christ'. Will not Oriental wisdom, on the contrary, allow the self to quit the spiritual mists in which it has lived too long? The Church has an answer: the imagined Orient does not belong to the East, for the Orient is nothing but the Eden of the Bible and, therefore, the common property of all. Western philosophy also: Oriental philosophy can be discovered in the West by way of the imagination and need not be sought in situ. The mind recognizes its own facile exoticism and decides for one brief moment that it can accomplish itself here and now: "Par l'esprit on va à Dieu" 'By our minds we go to God'. The words appear to come as an epiphany, but the question-begging nature of the argument is only too apparent inasmuch as esprit slips from signifying intelligence to spirit. The "impossible" of the title is, then, this blockage of reason caught in the net of its own aporias—"Déchirante infortune!" 'Grievous misfortune!'

So, after the madness of "Délires II", the self has grappled with reason and with reason's shortcomings. But now, after reason, work: the sixth part entitled "L'Eclair" weighs the virtues of labor. Rimbaud takes for a moment the voice of society which, as it denies the vanitas vanitatum of the biblical Preacher, espouses the cult of progress. "Le travail humain! c'est l'explosion qui éclaire mon abîme de temps en temps" 'Human labor! that is the explosion which illuminates my abyss from time to time'; again: "Rien n'est vanité; à la science, et en avant!" 'Nothing is vanity; to knowledge, forward march!' But humor subverts such a project, for the self declares that it will respect work in an absolute way—by not doing it ("en le mettant de côté"). It can playfully assume any number of gratuitous roles ("saltimbanque, mendiant, artiste, bandit,—prêtre!" 'acrobat, beggar, artist, bandit,—priest!') which would define poetry as detached theatre. Nevertheless, with a brusque shift, the serious nature of such a theatrical enterprise is realized in terms all the more touching in that they announce, twenty years before the event, Rimbaud's last days at the Hôpital de la Conception: "Sur mon lit d'hôpital, l'odeur de l'encens m'est revenue si puissante; gardien des aromates sacrés, confesseur, martyr …" 'On my hospital bed the smell of incense came back to me so powerfully; keeper of the holy aromatics, confessor, martyr … 'The religious terms carry the notions of sin and salvation that the self thought to have avoided ("Je reconnais là ma sale éducation d'enfance" 'I recognize my rotten childhood upbringing'). Anguish must be defused; a conventional life can be lived: "Aller mes vingt ans, si les autres vont vingt ans …" 'Let us be twenty if others are twenty …' Yet neither work nor the refusal to work suffices, since either choice merely postpones the realization of the meaninglessness of life, which is death. The speaker addresses his own soul—"chère pauvre âme"—with the knowledge that, whatever his choice, eternity is lost. From initial enthusiasm he is led by the self-critical intellect to despair.

"Matin", although the shortest of the sections, is crucial in opening the doors of the sensibility to past and future. The title posits an imaginary fulfillment which the four paragraphs trope in two even surges of past and present, present and future. The sum of desire is expressed in a plaintive confession that calls to witness the unseen audience of all humanity.

N'eus-je pas une fois une jeunesse aimable, héroïque, fabuleuse, à écrire sur des feuilles d'or,—trop de chance! Par quel crime, par quelle erreur, ai-je mérité ma faiblesse actuelle? Vous qui prétendez que des bêtes poussent des sanglots de chagrin, que des malades désespèrent, que des morts rêvent mal, tâchez de raconter ma chute et mon sommeil. Moi, je ne puis pas plus m'expliquer que le mendiant avec ses continuels Pater et Ave Maria. Je ne sais plus parler!

Pourtant, aujourd'hui, je crois avoir fini la relation de mon enfer. C'était bien l'enfer; l'ancien, celui dont le fils de l'homme ouvrit les portes.

Did I not have at one time a pleasant childhood, heroic, fabulous, to be inscribed on gold leaves,—too lucky! By what crime, by what error did I merit my present weakness? You who claim that animals sob with grief, that invalids despair, that dead men have bad dreams, try to tell of my fall and my sleep. I cannot explain myself any more than the beggar with his ceaselles Our Father's and Hail Mary's. I can no longer speak!

And yet today I think I have finished the account of my hell. It was indeed hell, the old hell, whose gates were opened by the son of man.

A fall has taken place like the mythical fall of man, the word "chance" already containing the paradox of luck and loss (Latin: cadens) in the midst of youth. Those who feel compassion for, and an instinctive identification with, animals as well as the sick and dead can perhaps explain the speaker to himself, since he himself has become brutish: he has reached the end of reasoned discourse, like a man who can only mumble his prayers as circular as madness.

Yet, at a time when there seems to be nowhere to turn, the speaker recognizes that his tale has been told. A new morning of freedom like that of youth before the fall can be imagined: if the anguish associated with Christianity is synonymous with the infernal round of sin and salvation, cannot the cycle be broken once and for all by the birth of another Messiah?

Du même désert, à la même nuit, toujours mes yeux las se réveillent à l'étoile d'argent, toujours, sans que s'émeuvent les rois de la vie, les trois mages, le cœur, l'âme, l'esprit. Quand irons-nous, par delà les grèves et les monts, saluer la naissance du travail nouveau, la sagesse nouvelle, la fuite des tyrans et des démons, la fin de la superstition, adorer—les premiers!—Noël sur la terre!

Le chant des cieux, la marche des peuples! Esclaves, ne maudissons pas la vie.

Front the same desert to the same night, my eyes forever waken to the silver star, and forever the three magi, the kings of life—heart, soul, mind, are not stirred. When shall we go, beyond shores and mountains, to salute the birth of the new work, the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, and worship—for the first time!—Christmas on earth!

The song of heaven, the progress of peoples! Slaves, let us not curse life.

The biblical echoes are clear, yet this is less parody than pastiche. The images answer those of the previous sections in an organic way; "la naissance du travail nouveau" answers "L'Eclair", which turned on the notion of work; "la sagesse nouvelle" answers "L'Impossible", which vainly sought wisdom; "la fuite des tyrans et des démons" answers "Nuit de l'enfer", in which God and Satan exercized their powers of domination; while "la fin de la superstition" refers back to "Mauvais Sang", its idolatries, Sabbaths, sacrileges, conversion. The inverse order sums up past conflicts while proposing the cult of another Christ untouched by Christianity. The tone is one of confidence: the protagonist has immersed himself in a chiliastic vision as compelling as it is unreasoned. He can look to future vigor like that of the "Million d'oiseaux d'or" of "Le Bateau ivre"; he can imagine heaven and earth moving to the harmony of song ("chant"), to the rhythms of collective progress ("marche"). The future appears as fair as the imagined past at the beginning of "Matin". The last words, however, rediscover the tension of present with future in which the negative command—"Esclaves, ne maudissons pas la vie"—includes statement and virtual counterstatement; for with what strength, and how durably, can the enslaved self wage its impossible conflict?

The poet changes stance and mode one last time to elaborate the tenuous image of liberation. On the one hand, autumn has come ("L'automne déjà …", "L'automne …"), and approaching winter is to be feared; on the other, night no doubt heralds a new morning. The two parts of the section comprising six, then eight paragraphs (they recall the binary structure of the preface) move in antithetical ways—first, from confidence to helplessness ("où puiser le secours?" 'where can help be found?'), then from loss to putative gain ("il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps" 'I shall be able to possess truth in a soul and a body'). Contrasting with the hortatory character of the last line of "Matin", "Adieu" finds a lyrical pattern and tone. The title sums up an emotional ambiguity which is both farewell to suffering and salute ("Adieu", "A Dieu") to the unknown god—"clarté divine"—that is beyond. (Not without relevance perhaps, Littré tells us that provincial French in Rimbaud's time still used "Adieu" both as goodbye and hello; thus, "Adieu, comment vous portez-vous?")

The combat of the entire poem is focused in this passion. Yet the time has come for the supernatural to be rejected ("je suis rendu au sol" 'I am returned to the earth'), for the Infernal Spouse to be exorcized ("je puis rire des vieilles amours mensongères" 'I can laugh at the old deceptive loves'), for the self's own peasant origins that were castigated in "Mauvais Sang" to be affirmed anew ("la realité rugueuse à étreindre! Paysan!" 'rough-skinned reality to be embraced! Peasant!'). The "horrible bush" of Christianity must be left behind. Nevertheless the last lines do not reject in any rational way the aporia of sin and salvation but rather musicalize it in a finale that pits truth against lie, strength against weakness, tenderness against fear, warmth against cold. Not forgetful of unanswerable arguments, the actor who is the self as post-Baudelairean Confessor precariously affirms the possibility of escape by way of his resurgent moral strength and lucid courage.⁹

Paul Valéry was severe in his judgment of Une Saison en enfer, which he considered to be the product of an easily imitable rhetoric: "Ce ne sont qu'expressions directes, jaculations, intensité" 'There are only direct statements, jaculations, intensity'.¹⁰ He preferred the Illuminations. Paul Claudel, on the other hand, put Une Saison en enfer above the Illuminations for its theme ("ce document incomparable")¹¹ no less than its style: "Il est certain que Rimbaud a beaucoup travaillé les Illuminations, mais beaucoup moins sur le papier que sur son âme. Comme style je les trouve inférieures à la Saison, qui, elle, est tout entière pénétrée par l'âme. Là plus aucune trace d'effort de bizarreries (comme l'indique le passage des brouillons), à ce moment dépassées et condamnées" 'It is certain that Rimbaud reworked the Illuminations a great deal, but much less in his manuscripts than in his soul. Stylistically I find them inferior to the Saison, which is wholly permeated by the soul. No longer does one find in it any trace of effort, of bizarreness (as indicated by the passage in the drafts), which is henceforth abandoned and condemned'.¹² Must we side with Claudel or Valéry? Or shall we say that their differences are comparable to those of René Char with Yves Bonnefoy by reason of basic incompatibilities? Surely both are right to underline the relative lack of complexity of Une Saison en enfer with respect to the Illuminations, Valéry pointing to the mode, Claudel to the sense. Nevertheless the uniqueness of Une Saison en enfer results not merely from its directness of language and emotion, nor from its valorization of a role that embraces the Christian tradition, but also from the admirable intellectual and emotional passion of a performance that brings into question the stylistic obliqueness of the Illuminations as it does the formalism of Les Fleurs du mal. (We recall that Rimbaud had written in his letter of May 1871: "la forme si vantée en lui est mesquine" 'his [Baudelaire's] much-praised form is puny').¹³

Does this, then, set Une Saison en enfer apart from the rest of the work? We are struck by a movement we take to be characteristic: Rimbaud on every occasion beginning with "Le Bateau ivre" writes his last poem. We think back to the pieces studied here and to others that might well have been chosen. The loss/gain scheme is at the heart of the poetry, not as a simplistic axis of resolution, but—this is Rimbaud's integrity—as drama. Although Une Saison en enfer mediates the antagonisms of intellect and sensibility within a religious scheme, it differs in kind and compass rather than in tension.

For each of his compositions, whether in verse or prose, Rimbaud lends an individual voice and setting to the dilemma. The good that is revolt, departure, creation, the evil that is conventionality, stasis, custom, are found at one extreme in the non-Christian frame of "Le Bateau ivre", the "Derniers Vers" and the Illuminations, at the other in the properly Christian frame of Une Saison en enfer. Language grasps irreducible contradictions that are taken to the limits of Rimbaud's imaginative and ironic powers. When we look at isolated lines we have no difficulty in identifying a number of profiles like those of "everybody's favorite hippy", or the "mystique à l'état sauvage", or the "Communard", or any other of the univocal models that have been suggested. But he goes beyond them by a self-awareness that recreates the theatre. If the subject on occasion may appear to be less than grave, we recognize as we read further the tragic urgency of this poet who forever broaches the issue of spiritual and social renewal and assumes his role as sacrificer and sacrificed. (I think of Nietzsche's words on Rousseau that point to "the magnanimity with which, as a man of knowledge, he dauntlessly, often with embarrassment, often with sublime mockery and smiling, offers himself and his life as sacrifice".)¹⁴ Rimbaud could abandon literature at the age of twenty, feeling no doubt that he had expressed in the many ways of which he was capable—"toutes les énergies chorales et orchestrales et leurs applications instantanées" 'ail choral and orchestral energies and their instantaneous applications'¹⁵—his dedication to poetry as vision and act.

Notes

¹ "Nuit de l'enfer", Une Saison en enfer, p. 222. Verlaine puts the same thought in musical terms when he writes: "La Muse … de M. Arthur Rimbaud prend tous les tons, pince toutes les cordes de la harpe, gratte toutes celles de la guitare et caresse le rebec d'un archet agile s'il en fut" 'Mr. Arthur Rimbaud's Muse … catches all the tones, plucks all the harp strings, scrapes all the guitar strings, and fondles the fiddle with as agile a bow as ever there was' ("Arthur Rimbaud", Œuvres en prose complètes, p. 645).

² Ibid., p. 221.

³ Thus, Kristin Ross (The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) evokes "this new 'emancipated' subjectivity that takes as its pdint of departure the radical atomization or isolation of the worker, and proceeds by heightening or exaggerating that atomization rather than masking it in a myth of workers' community …" (p. 119).

⁴ "Adieu", Une Saison en enfer, Œuvres, p. 240.

⁵ Letter to Ernest Delahaye, May 1873, Œuvres, p. 355. A facsimile of the first page, with a Rimbaud self-portrait, is to be found in the Album Rimbaud, ed. Henri Matarasso and Pierre Petitfils, Paris: Gallimard, "Pléiade", 1967, p. 159. Steve Murphy published a facsimile of the complete letter in Parade sauvage: revue d'études rimbaldiennes, no. 1, 1984.

⁶ The text is that of the Bernard-Guyaux Œuvres, pp. 211-241. For the most detailed critical edition, see Pierre Brunei, Une Saison en enfer, Paris: Corti, 1987.

⁷ I refer to the medieval genre which alternates prose and song.

⁸ See Paul Bénicḣou, Nerval et la chanson folklorique, Paris: Corti, 1970. Mallarmé, Laforgue, Claudel and Apollinaire were, among Rimbaud's contemporaries and immediate successors, especially sensitive to the poetic charge of folksongs. Thus the ultrarefined Mallarmé said that he wanted to plunge verse back into the spring waters of folksong so that it would be "mystérieux et natif" (Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, vol. 3, p. 316); while Guillaume Apollinaire, at the other end of the poetic spectrum, spoke similarly of folksong as "la source la plus limpide où puisse s'étancher la soif lyrique" 'the clearest source in which lyrical thirst may be quenched' (Vers et prose, June 1908).

⁹ Nothing seems to me further from solipsism, or a pathological narcissism, than the poetry of Rimbaud. I cannot therefore agree with Harold Bloom's remarks concerning the conclusion of Une Saison en enfer: "Possessing the truth in a single mind and a single body—one's own—is a narcissistic revelation akin to that of Walt Whitman at the close of Song of Myself" (Arthur Rimbaud, p. 5).

¹⁰Cahiers, Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 29 vols., 1957-1961, vol. 29, p. 871.

¹¹ "Verlaine poète de la nature et poète chrétien", Œuvres en prose, p. 494.

¹² F. Petralia: "Lettere inedite di Paul Claudel a Paterne Berrichon", Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, voi. 8, nos. 3-4, p. 236. Claudel's letter is dated 13 August 1913. His reference to the "brouillon" concerns the section originally entitled "Fausse Conversion", which includes much that was later to be elaborated in "Délires II". Rimbaud writes: "Je hais maintenant les élans mystiques et les bizarreries de style" 'I now hate mystical enthusiasms and bizarreness of style' (Œuvres, p. 340).

¹³Œuvres, p. 351.

¹⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröthe, in Werke, Leipzig: Kröner, 20 vols., 1900-1926, vol. 4, p. 310. Verlaine admirably points to the fatal necessity that distinguishes Rimbaud's life and poetry: "la vie, à lui qu'on a voulu travestir en loup-garou, est toute en avant dans la lumière et la force, belle de logique et d'unité comme son œuvre" 'the life of one who has been presented in the guise of a werewolf is wholly turned toward light and strength, beautiful in its logic and unity like his work' ("Arthur Rimbaud '1884'", Œuvres en prose complètes, p. 801).

¹⁵ "Solde", Œuvres, p. 293.