SOURCE: "Une Saison en enfer," in Arthur Rimbaud, New Directions, 1961, pp. 287-313.

[In the following excerpt from her book-length treatment of Rimbaud's life and works, Starkie identifies three principal themes in Une Saison en enfer: sin, belief in God, and conformity to the realities of human existence. She asserts that Une Saison reveals Rimbaud's inability either to resolve the conflict between good and evil, trade personal freedom for the love of God, or compromise his idealistic principles.]

With Le Bateau Ivre, Mémoire and certain poems from Illuminations, Une Saison en Enfer ranks as Rimbaud's greatest work. It contains some very lovely passages of writing which are prose poems in themselves, and could be printed as such, taken from their context.

In August 1873, after many weeks of anguish, he finished the work. We do not know how much there was still left to write when he returned wounded from Belgium at the end of July, nor how much he had written in London, nor yet how much he re-wrote of what he had already written, after his tragic experience. From the comparison of the rough draft—of which we have only two chapters—with the final version, we suspect that any changes he made must have been stylistic with a view to simplifying his vision and taking from it what was not necessary, rather than to altering the initial inspiration.

We know definitely—of this there can be no doubt—that Une Saison en Enfer was the book on which he had been at work since April, the 'Livre Païen ou Livre Nègre,' which he had mentioned in his letter to Delahaye in May, and of which three chapters were already written when he went to England with Verlaine. He might subsequently have scrapped these three chapters, but this supposition is unlikely since he would then scarcely have dated the finished work 'April-August 1873'. It can therefore safely be assumed that Une Saison en Enfer was begun in April and that even as early as that he intended to make a complete break with his past, with everything that he had hitherto prized and on which he had built his hopes. This point needs emphasizing since it is tempting to believe that it was the Brussels drama that drove him into relating his season in Hell and to say farewell to literature. It is naturally very probable that the events in Belgium gave a new poignancy and a fresh anguish to the struggle. Yet one of the more tragic chapters, "Nuit de l'Enfer," was written in London in July.

Une Saison en Enfer is composed of nine chapters of varying lengths, each, with the exception of the first, "Mauvais Sang," relating some single aspect of the struggle. There is no justification for printing—as Paterne Berrichon has done in the 1912 edition for Le Mercure de France—the prose poem describing Christ's first miracle, as an introduction, on no better grounds than that it was written on the reverse side of the rough draft of a chapter of the work. Rimbaud himself published Une Saison en Enfer and had he wished the poem to serve as a prologue he would have included it. Delahaye tells us in any case that this was a poem in the series he was projecting under the title Photographies du Temps Passé.¹

For alchemists the descent into Hell was symbolical for the descent into oneself. This is a terrifying experience and there is the psychological danger of the complete dissolution of the human personality, disintegration. Rimbaud's Saison en Enfer was the record of such a descent into himself and with him there was the danger of this disintegration of his personality, but he rose in the end victorious. According to the alchemists the Hermetic Philosopher makes this descent as a 'redeemer'. Rimbaud hoped that he might be such a redeemer.

Une Saison en Enfer is difficult to interpret as a whole for Rimbaud has described, simultaneously, the past, the present and the future and he has omitted all the connecting links. The leit motiven of the various problems which are besetting him surge each in turn and subside, only to burst out again with renewed force, at a later part of the work; or else they mingle together so as to form an intricate and bewildering fugue. The nature of the problems is mainly spiritual for it was spiritual aspiration which had driven him to adopt his particular form of art and so his failure was a spiritual rather than artistic failure. Thus the problem on which so many critics concentrate—the question of whether or not he intended to continue being a poet—pales into insignificance beside the greater spiritual problem. What was chiefly occupying him was his attitude to God and his previous doctrine of art had been closely linked with his religious conceptions. When he discovered that all his aspirations and hopes had been based on falsehood, he cast aside the art and the philosophy which had deceived him, but there was nothing to prevent his still being a poet, if a poet of a different kind.

The three important leit motiven in Une Saison en Enfer are the problem of sin, the problem of God—his personal need to believe in God—and finally the problem of life, the acceptance of life. These thread their way backwards and forwards through the texture of the work, and only, at the very end, are brought to full conclusion.

Rimbaud had previously imagined that with his art he had soared into the beyond, but he discovered now that it was not Heaven into which he had penetrated, but Hell; it had verily been a season in Hell. It was his pride and arrogance which had brought him to such a pass and had led him into the deepest state of sin. This brought him face to face with the problem of evil. What was sin and did it really exist? At the time of the first Illuminations he had thought that the tree of Good and Evil could finally be cut down.

But this had been an illusion like all his other illusions, for the tree had sent out sucker shoots that had grown big enough to destroy him. 'Le vice qui a poussé ses racines à mon côté, dès l'âge de raison,—qui monte au ciel, me bat, me renverse, me traîne.'²

One of his main reasons for beginning to write Une Saison en Enfer was to solve, once and for all, the problem of this conflict between Good and Evil. He had meant by his first title, 'Livre Païen ou Livre Nègre,' to indicate that his intention was to return to the days before the advent of Christianity, before there had existed the tragic dilemma of right and wrong. Pagans and Negroes can still live in blissful ignorance knowing nothing of the problem of good and evil; the tree of knowledge, with its heavy sickly shade, does not yet darken their lives. Rimbaud refused to accept the ideals of Christianity and intended to return to the real kingdom of the children of Ham.³ 'Prêtres, professeurs, maîtres, vous vous trompez en me livrant à la justice. Je n'ai jamais été de ce peuple-ci; je n'ai jamais été chrétien; je ne comprends pas les lois; je n'ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute, vous vous trompez.

'Oui, j'ai les yeux fermés à votre lumière. Je suis une bête, un nègre. Mais je puis être sauvé.'⁴

This was in the early days of composition. But, as he worked at the book and pondered on the problem, he discovered—to his great anguish—that he was, after all, like all the others, that he could not escape his hereditary taint, that he could not wipe out the traces of his baptism, that no one of the west could ever eradicate the imprint left by two thousand years of Christianity. His whole nature, his mind and soul, had been formed and moulded by the civilization from which he had thought he could escape. With the food he ate, the water he drank, the very air he breathed, he absorbed into his being the tainted ideals of Christianity. Long before he had been conceived it had been decreed that he should be born a westerner and there was no way of escaping this fatality however passionate might be his longing. The characteristic sign of westerners, of Christians, is their consciousness of sin. Baudelaire's poetry had been the expression of the conflict between Spleen and Idéal. Rimbaud's work now becomes the expression of a similar conflict—between God and Satan, between good and evil. The two voices rise one after the other, sometimes in unison, sometimes mingling in a strange duet. With Baudelaire we have no doubt on which side he would wish to weight the scales; but with Rimbaud we do not know which voice is stronger, nor which is divine, that of God or Satan, and even he himself is uncertain.

The second leit motif is that of Rimbaud's longing for God, for a belief in God. His need of God was one of the fundamental needs of his nature and when he found that he could no longer accept the God of his Catholic teaching he could not rest until he had found a God which would satisfy his spiritual aspirations. He had staked everything on expressing God and the infinite, on becoming like unto God himself. When this conviction failed he was left bewildered and lost. His problem was now whether he could return to the humble Christian position in front of God. From the beginning to the end of Une Saison en Enfer we find expressed his burning longing for a religion in which to lose himself, but his longing is damped down by his inability to accept the loss of personality and liberty, by his desire to keep 'la liberté dans le salut'. He was incapable of the simple trusting faith of Verlaine; he would not be God's humble servant, nor the patient little donkey of the Lord. And seeing in himself the longing and the desire for faith he cried, 'Je reconnais là ma sale éducation d'enfance.'⁵

In spite of what Catholic critics allege, Rimbaud came out of his season in Hell determined to leave God's love behind him and to keep his personal freedom at all costs. That was part of the victory on which, at the end, he prided himself; he had not yielded in spite of his longing to give in; God fought him with all His powers of persuasion, with all the weight of His arm, but he had stood firm till the end and kept himself intact. Nevertheless his later career was to prove that his victory had left him mutilated and that by stifling the voice of God in himself he condemned himself to live out his life spiritually maimed and crippled.

The third big problem is that of the acceptance or endurance of life as we have to live it in the world. The manner in which Rimbaud approached this problem and tried to solve it reveals his fundamental inability to accept life as it is and to live like all those ordinary human beings whom he so deeply despised. Une Saison en Enfer is, for the greater part, an acute expression of the idealism of youth hurt by the ugliness which it encounters and which it cannot explain, since it has not yet learnt—the bitterest of all the lessons which we have to learn—to make concessions with our ideals and principles, and to accept the second best. Rimbaud never learned to make concessions and since he was not able to possess what he believed was la vraie vie he would have nothing. In the days of his pride and his belief in his powers he refused life as it was given to him; he intended to create his own life, on his own conditions. He would destroy everything that existed naturally in himself; he would build everything again and transform life. And so he spurned and refused all the things which made life sweet for ordinary simple human beings—work, love and hope. 'Quant au bonheur établi, domestique ou non…. Non je ne peux pas!'⁶ he exclaimed. Slowly, and by degrees he destroyed all the things in him which had made him a human being, and in this struggle he became willingly, with masochistic delight, a new kind of martyr. But this martyrdom eventually led him only to the dead end of the acceptance of the inevitable, to the grudging acceptance of reality, of perpetual slavery. He belonged to the slave race and so it did not behove him to curse life. 'Esclaves, ne maudissons pas la vie!'⁷

Rimbaud's bateau ivre, instead of bearing him into the centre of the ocean of infinity, or as Baudelaire's boat to the shores at least of that endless sea, had merely described a complete circle, bringing him back to the reality from which he had fled, from which he had imagined he had escaped, to revolting reality. That was the final port into which his boat sailed after all the storms and the return was not easy. Whatever he might say or think, reality was what Rimbaud was never able—and never would be able—to accept. 'L'automne déjà, notre barque élevée dans les brumes immobiles tourne vers le port de la misère, la cité énorme au ciel taché de feu et de boue.'⁸ …

Notes

¹Rimbaud [1923], pp. 45-6.

²Mauvais Sang (Une Saison en Enfer) (Oeuvres Complètes [ed. Jules Mouquet and Roll and de Renéville, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1946], p. 208).

³ Ham's descendants were thought to be the negro race.

⁴Mauvais Sang (Une Saison en Enfer) (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 208).

⁵L'Eclair (Une Saison en Enfer) (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 227).

⁶Mauvais Sang (Une Saison en Enfer) (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 211).

⁷Matin (Une Saison en Enfer) (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 228).

⁸ Ibid….