Tom Conley

VENUS BACKWARDS From Rimbaud to Ronsard

Today readers of “Vénus anadyomène,” Rimbaud’s delightfully grotesque sonnet of 1870 describing a hideous goddess emerging from a bathtub, appreciate the contrariety of its aesthetic in view of ’s Birth of (1863), depicting a supine nude floating on the froth of the sea, that implicitly asks its viewers to see it through Botticelli. Rimbaud’s poem works dialogically, tapping into an ekphrastic tradition that described the goddess with prurient pleasure. His sonnet demands that it be read as a foil to Ronsard and a tradi- tion that portray the escumière fille (the frothy girl) in relation to the model of the great Florentine painter. From the perspective of literary history, the sonnet at- tests to how nineteenth-century poets retrieved in Renaissance models the brute being of ‘counter-discourses’ and shaped it into aesthetic programs at odds with those of the Second Empire.

Readers of the contributions to this handsome volume note quickly that Al- exandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (1863) is both a recurring point of reference for reflection on the legacy of an ‘academic’ appreciation of the goddess. Idol and ideal in the same breath, she might be the reverse of the Rokeby Ve- nus that had inspired Cabanel’s enemy, Edouard Manet, to paint his Olympia in 1864. By virtue of its title, Cabanel’s painting reaches back to the Renais- sance, not only to Botticelli’s great painting of the same title, but also to po- ems inspired by what their authors saw in Botticelli’s figure of the goddess standing gracefully on the edge of a cockleshell that seems to waft in the scalloped froth of the sea. Poised and seemingly lost in reflection, her head slightly tilted to let her hair float in a warm breeze, Venus is born in the name of beauty and charm. Concealing one breast under the wrist of her right hand while touching the top of the other with three extended fingers, her left hand gently covers her pubis with locks of her auburn hair. She re- mains at the core of the modern imagination of Venus Anadyomene. Cabanel seems to build his Venus in memory of Botticelli, to be sure, but clearly from Goya’s The Naked Maja, the difference being that the gaze the goddess aims at the viewer admiring in Goya’s stunning display is absent. Shielding 164 Tom Conley whatever light might strike her half-open eyes under the shadow her right hand casts upon her face, Cabanel’s Venus, supine, bathes in erotic slumber. Unlike Botticelli’s, her auburn hair floats on a whitecap over which five putti, reminders more of windheads from antique maps than Botticelli’s personifi- cations of the sea-breezes, prance in agitation. From the standpoint of a literary historian, Cabanel’s painting might be a foil not only to Manet’s Olympia but also, specifically, to Arthur Rimbaud’s “Venus anadyomène,” a sonnet that unintentionally seems to have been written directly against what Cabanel made of the goddess. Yet the same his- torian would be at odds about how to bring the painting into the sphere of the poet’s short and tumultuous life. Rimbaud, an adolescent schoolboy living far from Paris in 1872, would never have strolled through the exhibi- tion of 1863 where the painting was on display. Would he have heard of it? An admirer of lithographs and prints, would he have seen a representation of the painting in an illustrated newspaper or journal? The questions have little currency when we consider the unconscious relation a poet holds with the longer duration of inherited icons or, broadly, what long ago art histo- rian Henri Focillon called their vie des formes. With the language they use, po- ets move through figurations of which they are often unaware. A first point is that in his sonnet Rimbaud calls into question both the prurient stakes of Cabanel’s representation of the goddess and the very project of her repre- sentation tout court. A second is that the sonnet does what it does through its synesthetic correspondence with other, earlier sonnets that describe the goddess—indeed, sonnets of which the poet in most likelihood was unaware but which his poem draws into the shimmer of its form. In this respect, the relation that the sonnet establishes with its avatars confirms what historian Michel Foucault had noted about the emergence of the ‘Renaissance’ on the horizon of the modern world: The poet of ‘Moder- nity’ (that Baudelaire had defined through his famous essay on Constantin Guys) takes a devastatingly critical view of contemporary life—for the au- thor of Les Fleurs du Mal the Second Empire and for Rimbaud events leading to the Commune of 1871–72—through new and unforeseen allegiance with the labors of poets and artists they displace into the world of their time. Hence Foucault on how the “brute being” of the Renaissance comes for- ward throughout the nineteenth century:

On peut dire en un sens que la ‘littérature’, telle qu’elle s’est constituée et s’est désignée comme telle au seuil de l’âge moderne, manifeste la réapparition, là où l’on ne l’attendait pas, de l’être vif du langage. […] Or, tout au long du XIXe siècle et jusqu’à nous encore—de Hölderlin à Mallarmé, à Antonin Artaud—, la littérature n’a existé dans son autonomie, elle ne s’est détachée de tout autre lan- gage par une coupure profonde qu’en formant une sorte de ‘contre-discours’, et