The Utopian Body in Rimbaud Robert St. Clair

LAUGHING MATTER(S): POLITICS AND POETICS OF THE (UTOPIAN) BODY IN RIMBAUD’S LES EFFARÉS1

Mon corps, cette forme pensive . . . Valéry

Le fait du corps . . . “C’est épatant comme ça a du chien,” writes Rimbaud on 25 August 1870, just as Prussian forces were approaching Charlesville-Mézières and a few short days before the poet would set out—somewhat illicitly—for Paris. “Les notaires, les vitriers [. . .] et tous les ventres qui, chassepot au cœur, font du patrouillotisme [. . .]; ma patrie se lève, moi j’aime mieux la voir assise. Ne remuez pas les bottes ! C’est mon principe” (Poésies complètes 63). Resistance to the ideological machinery of nationalism, the kind capable of mobilizing bodies and eventually getting them killed, takes a number of forms and articulations in Rimbaud’s letter: comically distorted reductions of fgures of power to so many overcharged limbs and instruments, a rhetoric of biting sarcasm, and a proclamation of principled laziness, if not an ethical maxim, in the form of a refusal to faire corps with the body politic: “Ne remuez pas les bottes.” Yet just as startling as the thinly veiled, slightly sadistic wish to see his native city (“supérieurement idiote entre les petites villes de province”) besieged (“moi, j’aime mieux la voir . . . assise”), or indeed the contrast the poet draws between his idle feet and those of the “épiciers retraités qui revêtent l’uniforme,” is the hilariously surreal metonym reducing the Carolopolitan bourgeoisie to a gaggle of grotesque “ventres” marching about town in a mix of trigger-happy, nationalistic élan and absurd horror. Rimbaud—mutatis mutandis, every bit the equal of Daumier in the visual domain in this respect—manages to capture the preening self-regard of these psychotic Messrs. Prudhomme with devastatingly ironic neologism,

1. My thanks to Mária Brewer, Ross Chambers, Bruno Chaouat, Cheryl Kruger, Maurice Samuels, and Seth Whidden for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this essay.

The Romanic Review Volume 104 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 84 Robert St. Clair itself a form of violence marking the body of the signifer: “[Ils] font du patrouillotisme” (Poésies complètes 63).2 Though this letter to Georges Izambard has not enjoyed anything like the literary posterity of Rimbaud’s lettre(s) du voyant, one detects in these lines a complex articulation of poetry and the body, of text and history, together with a strategic use of laughter to deterritorialize, to render strange in unexpected ways, certain received, or authoritative, models of reading and writing poetry in the late Second Empire. Following Michel Foucault’s suggestive insight into the centrality of the human body to the utopian imagination—that is, that the fundamental matrix of utopia may just be the human body, with its “architecture fantastique et ruinée”—I propose, frst and foremost, that there is a kind of utopian body that remains to be mapped out in Rimbaud’s early verse production. Second, and starting from this heuristic postulate, in the following pages I attempt to interrogate, explore, and reevaluate the stakes of a particular iteration of this utopian body. For in the poem “Les Effarés,” the reader is asked to contemplate what we might call the fait du corps—that is, the material vulnerability of bodies that become the surface of inscription for a critical diagnosis of the given social, political, and poetic formations of the late Second Empire; and upon which, in the laughter that bursts the seams of a quite self-consciously misérabiliste tableau, a radical desire for difference, for a different distribution of the coordinates of the social and the esthetic, is expressed.3 It will perhaps come as no earth-shattering revelation to anyone who has read Steve Murphy’s meticulous and groundbreaking exegeses of Rimbaud over the past twenty years4 that the poet borrows this trope, through which the

2. The word “coeur” has an ambivalent, disseminative status in the Rimbaldian corpus from this era, frequently designating the masculine sex, as Steve Murphy, following Ascione and Chambon’s initial philological insight, has pointed out repeatedly. Thus, “chassepots au coeur” could be read as a sign of patriotic fervor and as a comic act of (homoerotic) copulation, if not masturbation (Rimbaud, 1991; Ascione and Chambon 118). On Rimbaud and the poetics of caricature, see, inter alia, a recent essay by Philippe Rocher in which the author manages to make some unexpected, but highly persuasive, links between “Les Effarés” and such profoundly socially engaged (and vehemently anticlerical) texts as “Accroupissements” and “Vénus Anadyomène” (“Accroupissements” 261–81). 3. On the different fgures and functions of the utopic, see Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (1–21) and “The Politics of Utopia.” Our own thinking on the utopic and the situation of Rimbaud’s lyric production at the end of the Second Empire and in the aftermath of the Paris Commune owes much to Jameson’s important theorizations of the utopian as concept, fgure, desire, aporia, and horizon. 4. His latest, Rimbaud et la Commune (2010), represents in many respects a synthesis of a line of thinking frst opened up in his Premier Rimbaud (1991). The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 85

members of the dominant class are designated by the girth of their stomachs, from felds that are both esthetic and political—that is, from the visual feld and rhetoric of caricature, if not indeed from an established discursive tradition tracing back to the First Republic (a moment that might be said to coincide with the emergence of modern caricature [Kadison 24]).5 Indeed, in the texts and correspondences from 1870 to 1871, there’s an entire socio-semiology of “stomachy” subjects that remains to be interrogated. From the bourgeois bouffs of “À la musique” to the above-mentioned ventres patrouillotiques, in passing by “Le Forgeron’s” “roi debout sur son ventre” or the “estomac écoeuré” of “frère Milotus” in “Accroupissements,” the gastric plays a critical role in Rimbaud’s work. It simultaneously signposts the overlap of bodily and social hierarchy while metonymically reducing certain key fgures of class, sovereignty, and ideology (les ventripotents, one might say) to so many out- of-control, grotesque stomachs feasting at the expense of the other limbs of the social body. There is, in other words, a politics of the body as well as a somatic poetics to be accounted for in the early Rimbaldian corpus.6 Lazy (“Sensation,” “Au Cabaret-vert”), queer (“Le Sonnet du trou du cul”), marginal (“À la Musique”), and revolutionary (“Le Forgeron”) bodies abound in the early Rimbaud. Bodies with a rage or thirst for the unknown, willing to risk all for a “grand temps nouveau” (“Le Forgeron”), or as a setting for “other spaces,” spaces of gloriously libidinal marginality and freedom that Attle Kittang once aptly designated as zones of expansion into “géographies de bonheur” (59), are so prevalent in Rimbaud’s early lyric production that they seem to designate the very location of a link between social and lyrical (dis)order, a node of articulation where the political and the esthetic intervene, or are implicated, in each other. Rather than some feshy, unregenerate prison entombing the “soul” of the poet, where the soul (as it may appear in a certain, no doubt overly simplifed, iteration of the Parnassian imaginary in which Rimbaud was steeped)7 would be the very marker or guarantor of the substantial and

5. Revolutionary caricature from the period 1792–93 abounds in depictions of the anarchic appetites of the royal family. Following his arrest at Varennes, Louis XVI is often visually troped as (an escaped) pig. Dolf Oehler, for his part, points out that the epithets “repus” and “ventrus” were insults explicitly designating the bourgeoisie as early as the 1830s (21). 6. The following remarks on the context of the “Effarés” and the politics of (writing) the corporeal indeed form part of a study the author is currently undertaking on the materialist poetics of the body in the early Rimbaud (1870–72). 7. Consider the opening alexandrine of Mallarmé’s “Brise marine,” published in the frst volume of Le Parnasse Contemporain (note the twofold rhetorical/metrical emphasis generated by placing the phatic hélas in the sixth position): “La chair est triste hélas // et j’ai lu tous les livres” (168). 86 Robert St. Clair intentional specifcity of the lyrical subject,8 the body in the early Rimbaldian corpus forms the site of emergence for a radically material poetics. The ideal and the profane, the high and the low do not so much cancel each other out as they become dialectically interrelated, caught up in one another—quite like the interplay between form and content in these early poems, especially in the sonnets (Bobillot 11, 54; Murat 201–25; St. Clair). A corps-texte, or corps-signe, the Rimbaldian body is the topos where the language of the lyric and that of everyday life intersect; it’s the site where the factum brutum of our vulnerable, creaturely fnitude and of our fundamental sociality is affrmed. It is the site, then, of leisure, revolt, pleasure, solidarity, and excess—not only of the (in)famous dérèglement raisonné de tous les sens variety (le corps a ses raisons que la raison ignore, one might say), but also of language itself. Indeed, poetry qua use of language reveals itself here to be a rudimentary dimension of the body, linking us to others, to the world about us, and indeed to (our experience of) ourselves on the basis of a shared presupposition of meaningfulness and a propensity for playfulness.9 Just as we fail, in some basic sense, to totally coincide with ourselves (or others) without fssures or intervals—indeed, such gaps are occasioned by that form of systematic decentering we call language—poetry is a symbolic practice that, in the very act of rendering idle a certain referential functionality of language (Jakobson 220), also liberates the splendid complexity of the body of the signifer (its prosody, the sonorous architecture of its potential rhythms, sounds, and senses strung together less for their communicational value than for the pleasurable sensations that they produce in our mouths and ears as readers). If in Rimbaud’s early verse, however, we catch a dizzying glimpse of the deep undecidability of our ontological rootedness in bodies that we both are and

8. In De l’Allemagne, Mme de Staël defnes poetic activity as a kind of struggle situated between the body and the mind/soul of an (essentially Cartesian) artistic genius: “Le poète ne fait [. . .] que dégager le sentiment prisonnier au fond de l’âme” (53). On the subversion of lyric subjectivity in Rimbaud and Verlaine, see the introduction to Leaving Parnassus (Whidden). 9. As Marx points out in one of the more suggestive passages of The German Ideology, language is an absolutely material dimension of human existence to the precise degree that human existence is a social one, one of being-together. Thus, what Marx understands by species-being is not some doggedly deterministic biological fatalism, but rather our very being insofar as it is at once singular and collective, social. Language, in the schema Marx proposes, is the very medium by which we come into subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and indeed the world (it can also be a means by which one changes the world and the ideas about it). “Language is as old as consciousness,” writes Marx, “[it] is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well [. . .]. Like consciousness, [it] only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men” (51). The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 87 have (je est un autre, after all); if Rimbaud’s poetic somatics sketch a portrait of the body as partage, as shared sensational (and egalitarian) enjoyment, this same body constitutes a profoundly social, indeed critical topos: it is perhaps always also the site where the tragic disparities of human existence in an unjust social confguration are denounced (sometimes angrily, sometimes comically), and where a potentially revolutionary break with this order of domination becomes imaginable. With that in mind, let us turn to an example of what we might call the textuality and contexts of the Rimbaldian body—its politics, its poetics, and its base, potentially comic ungovernability—and its crucial semiotic function in the fnal tercet of ’s “Les Effarés.”

Les Effarés, or: How Not to Split a Body (of Work) “Les Effarés” is a text with a philologically fascinating, complex genealogy. Having frst composed it sometime before October 1870, Rimbaud revised the poem on a number of occasions, notably when sending it off to poets (e.g., Paul Demeny, Jean Aicard, and eventually ) whose esthetic eye he was no doubt hoping to catch in the event that they might ultimately help him publish his work, if not escape from his “ville supérieurement idiote.”10 Above all, however, “Les Effarés” is the sort of text that renders problematic the hypothesis that there is in Rimbaud something like a clean break between social engagement and poetic production in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. For indeed there exists a tendency to see in the poems that constitute the dossier Demeny (among which we fnd “Les Effarés”) a stammering poetic

10. The poem was actually frst published in 1878 in an English journal and was subsequently republished by Verlaine in his series on the Poètes maudits. On the various versions and their editorial treatment, see Steve Murphy’s indispensable notes on the text in his edition of Rimbaud’s Oeuvres complètes (Rimbaud, Oeuvres 256– 75), as well as his authoritative study of the “Effarés” (Murphy, Stratégies 83–119). In some respects, as Murphy frst pointed out in a 2001 article, “Les Effarés” is a monumentally important poem—with it begins a properly literary seduction between Rimbaud and Verlaine, with the former nabbing a rhyme-pair straight out of Verlaine’s “En bateau” (in Les Fêtes galantes) (“La rime comme clin d’oeil”). The rhyme that Rimbaud borrowed was no doubt the sort of homage that might indeed pique Verlaine’s interest: “culotte::tremblotte” (Murphy, “La Rime” 6–7). One might surmise, based on Verlaine’s later reference to Goya in a brief commentary on “Les Effarés,” that he saw in this literary homage a kind of encrypted reference to the poet’s Saturnine temperament, with all the potentially transgressive dimensions this term might entail: not only is Verlaine the poète saturnien par excellence, but in the Album zutique, Ernest Cabaner is caricatured as a Saturn with an improbably large phallus indulging in an act of auto-fellatio (which leads one to wonder whether “Saturn,” as a mangeur de grains, wasn’t a more or less decipherable antonomasis in gay slang/culture of the era). 88 Robert St. Clair verb, one still unsure of itself, whereas the post-Commune poems (e.g., “” and “Le Sonnet des ”) are thought to be representative of the mature poetic “vision” that the poet announces in his famous lettre du voyant. For certain critics, the necessary condition of this aesthetic “maturity” is nothing less than the evacuation of the social from the poet’s artistic work, a plunging into the opaque, mysterious folds of a signifer deprived of both subject and situation. Yet such hermeneutic positions prove relatively untenable, if not unconvincing. There is, after all, a multiplicity of legitimate positions in the vast hermeneutic circle, even if some are invariably less plausible than others for more or less increasingly empirical reasons (especially in the aftermath of Steve Murphy’s Rimbaud et la Commune). The lettre du voyant that Rimbaud sent to Paul Demeny on 15 May 1871 contains three poems (three “psaumes d’actualité”) meant to illuminate the poet’s (in)famously mature “seer theory” of poetic production, including the hyper-Communard “Chant de guerre parisien”—which opens the letter—and the masterpiece of anticlerical verbal caricature with which the letter concludes, “Accroupissements” (Murphy, Rimbaud 191–206; Rocher, “Accroupissements” 61–81).11 In its own fashion, “Les Effarés” emblematizes the degree to which such divisions in the poet’s corpus, between a putatively political immaturity and a post-political maturity bound to fame out in a brilliant, aestheticist auto-da-fe, are problematic to say the least. Indeed, in its own way, the trajectory of “Les Effarés” offers us a kind of meta-narrative not only about Rimbaud’s literary production but about its reception, too. For if the poem fgures among the works that Rimbaud enjoins Paul Demeny to “brûle[r], je le veux!” (PC 165), on 10 June 1871, a mere ten days later, Rimbaud sends a variant of the same text to the Parnassian poet Jean Aicard (Murphy, Stratégies 83 n. 2; Rocher, “Composition” 1). Later that summer, not only would Rimbaud send the poem to Verlaine, but the text actually appears to have fgured in a projected collection of socialist/ Communard verse that Rimbaud intended to publish in Brussels when he and Verlaine left Paris in July 1872 (Murphy, Rimbaud 583–607). At the very least, then, we might claim that the poet continued to consider this poem as a key text in his lyrical works, if not indeed at some level a work exemplary of his poetic “vision.”12 One could say the same for Verlaine, for that matter. Over a decade later, the poem clearly still struck Verlaine as being among the

11. In a version of this letter sent to his former professor, Georges Izambard, Rimbaud not coincidentally proclaims his specifcally poetic solidarity with the workers who “meurent pourtant encore tandis que je vous écris” (Poésies complètes 144). 12. Our thanks to Ross Chambers for sharing with us the suggestive hypothesis that with “Les Effarés,” we may just get a very early glimpse at something like the “everyday miracle,” or alchemy, of poetic creation—an early instance of what the praxis of The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 89

most representative in the Rimbaldian corpus, presumably for its complex, overdetermined admixture of aesthetics and politics; of gentle caricature, tenderness, and anger. There’s something designed to provoke laughter, but also something “raw”—indeed, something a bit violent, if not cruel (farouche). Writing in 1884, Verlaine described “Les Effarés” in the following (allusively Saturnine) terms:

Nous ne connaissons pour notre part dans aucune littérature quelque chose d’un peu farouche, et de si tendre, de gentiment caricatural et de si cordial [que Les Effarés. . .]. [C]’est du Goya pire et meilleur.13 Goya et Murillo consultés nous donneraient raison. (96–97)

But if such philological details indubitably trouble the sort of neat divide discussed above on more or less chronological grounds, one still has to account for how and why “Les Effarés” continued to interpellate the poet and his (closest) readers throughout the 1870s and 1880s. One possible response to this philological and hermeneutic conundrum may not only have to do with Verlaine’s complex oscillation between extreme political poles in the 1880s, to say nothing of his possible continued affection for l’homme aux semelles de vent (Bernadet 9–22). It may also have to do with the way in which Rimbaud himself continued to see his poetic project as consistent with the utopian imaginary and politics of his earlier works. The key to this reading may well be the (highly ambivalent) fgure of a baker working in the middle of the night—a fgure that, when placed within the right co-textual light, is not without a certain Communard legibility. For though this baker may be read along a number of complex and perhaps contradictory lines—lines that we do not for the moment propose to disentangle (e.g., as a fgure of the poet laboring to create an object whose “croutes [qui] chantent” are at once nourishing and artistic, musical and material; as a disturbing ur-Vater pulling bread out of a “trou chaud qui souffe la vie”)—on some minimal level he is also a fgure of labor, if not of certain extreme working conditions. Indeed, commenting on what she terms the “voracité nocturne de l’ogre industriel,” Simone Delattre notes that night labor in bakeries was a singularly illustrative instance of the divide, of the unequal partage du sensible, separating

voyance might look like, to say nothing of a further point of articulation between the verse and prose poems. 13. Verlaine no doubt had in mind Goya’s Saturn, but perhaps also Murillo’s portraits of street-urchins eating grapes or picking lice off one another (a painting that fgures prominently in Rancière’s recent reading of Hegel, leisure, and the politics of the aesthetic in Aisthesis). 90 Robert St. Clair the working poor from an “élite oisive [dont] les réjouissances nocturnes s’accompagnaient d’une ostentation croissante sous le Second Empire” (250– 53). “Plus signifcatif [. . .] que le cas-limite de la main d’œuvre enfantine,” argues Delattre, “est celui du travail nocturne pratiqué dans les boulangeries de Paris,” the employees of which Louis Roux refers to in his 1841 Paris nocturne as veritable “esclaves nocturnes” forced to labor through the night, the whole year-round, and whose “cris plaintifs [. . .] saccad[és] comme le souffe d’un taureau” one might hear, late at night, “en longeant le trottoir, par des soupiraux étranges” (qtd. in Delattre 253). In fact, this very question of night labor in bakeries was a crucial discursive feature of late–Second Empire working-class politics, forming something like an indispensable chronotope for giving form (that is, a kind of twofold aesthetic and political existence) to the wrongs and injustices of contemporary capitalism. In 1869—at a period when violently repressed strikes were frequently breaking out in the mines of the north—a “chambre syndicale des ouvriers boulangers de Paris” was formed expressly to suppress night work. Still more pertinent to the historical juncture in which Rimbaud was (re)writing “Les Effarés” is the fact that among the tangible social reforms that the Paris Commune was able to enact before its brutal repression,14 one fnds precisely a response to this very political grievance. On 20 April 1871, night work in bakeries was abolished by the Paris Commune, a measure perceived at the time as tangible proof of the Commune’s commitment to the revolutionary democratic principles of la République sociale and to a genuinely egalitarian, indeed socialist, political organization of the city (Tombs 97). Leo Fränkel, the Commune’s délégué au Travail, famously went so far as to call the suppression of night work in the bakeries “the only true socialist decree that the Commune (. . .) passed” (qtd. in Tombs 97). The measure even featured prominently in at least one anti-Commune caricature that sought to depict the law on nocturnal labor in bakeries, and by extension the entire Commune qua sociopolitical project and emancipatory event, as some combination of hopelessly misguided naiveté and profigacy.15 It is far from improbable, in other words, that one of the poem’s initial co-textual felds in 1870 was an oppositional, if not socialist, political discourse, and at the time of its revision in 1871, the poem may well

14. These reforms included the cancelation of back rent, the nationalization of abandoned workshops and their transformation into worker co-ops, and the promotion of free, secular public education (Shafer 110–43). 15. In his study of the visual representations of the Paris Commune, James Leith reproduces a caricature by Darjou frst published in the reactionary Le Grelot in the summer of 1871. It depicts a Parisian lamplighter working during the day, with the following caption: “Revue du mois de mai: Les allumeurs de gaz ayant demandé eux aussi à travailler le jour” (Leith 139). The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 91 be thought to have constituted a kind of souvenir, or archive, of what many took to be the Commune’s most emblematic piece of social reform, a kind of tangible proof that through collective action, the destitute, exploited, and miserable masses could indeed be transformed into political agents capable of transforming the given. It is even possible that, precisely for this reason, the poem continued to interest Rimbaud well into 1872 (that is, when he was still entertaining the project of a socialist collection of verse akin to Verlaine’s project for Les Vaincus). With that in mind, let us turn to “Les Effarés,” to its (empty) stomachs, its gaps, its holes, and its laughter “un peu farouche” as Verlaine might put it.

Les Effarés, or: What Are You Laughing At? . . . Collant leur petit museaux roses Au grillage, chantant des choses, entre les trous,

Mais bien bas, - comme une prière . . . Repliés vers cette lumière Du ciel rouvert,

-Si fort, qu’ils crèvent leur culotte -Et que leur lange blanc tremblot(t)e Au vent d’hiver . . . Les Effarés

In “Les Effarés,” we attend to something like the inverse of Rimbaud’s politics of the stomach (metonymically associating, as suggested above, an excess of social power with a capacity for excessive consumption). It’s a poem in which we “see” cinq petits witnessing something like the “primal scene” (so to speak) of their total social destitution.16 Somewhat resonant with Baudelaire’s famille d’yeux, Rimbaud’s cinq petits—misère!—contemplate the basic fact that their marginalization has become a quotidian fxture of social existence, a sign that things are in their place rather than the alarm bell sounding a crisis (recalling Benjamin’s melancholic insight that for the

16. And there surely is a potentially Oedipal dimension to the fgure of this baker, as many have noted (Hackett; Murphy, Stratégies 108; Rocher, “Accroupissements” 277). We would like to defer such a heuristic for the moment, while noting that it could be eminently possible to read this poem in light of a kind of Bloomian model of literary relationships, particularly if we opt for the hypothesis that the baker fgure might be taken as representative of a certain type of misérabiliste poetics. 92 Robert St. Clair poor, the real crisis is not that things could conceivably get worse, but rather that they will remain the same). What these famished little subjects “see” is a certain excess located at once in a sphere of production and consumption and a certain relationship binding the two: the fact that (at least) one segment of society can indulge its unconstrained appetites at the expense of, or in glib indifference to, the grinding misery of le petit peuple. Note, for that matter, the slightly uncanny, if not obscene, “gras sourire” on the lips of this Rimbaldian baker. As Philippe Rocher notes, we can hear in the syntagmatic anaphora “preposition + N” at lines two, eleven, and twenty-nine (Au grand soupirail, etc.) that at least three occurrences of the word “ogre” emerge rhythmically from the poem (“Accroupissements” 278). As Rocher eloquently suggests, perhaps the most compelling reading of this persistent poetic impensé, encrypted at the level of the text’s semiosis rather than at the level of its semantico-lexical content, is as a fgural mode of social critique—one taking aim at a sociopolitical (and poetic) order that dissimulates “un phénomène de dévoration [. . .] concret et brutal [. . .]: celui de la violence sociale de la société moderne sur les pauvres” (“Accroupissements” 278). We ought to resist the temptation, in other words, of staying situated at the level of the individual or the subjective (e.g., Oedipalizing the fgure of the baker as an uncanny stand-in for Saturn devouring his children). We might suppose that part of the diffculty in cutting the hermeneutic knot of the baker-ogre’s contradictory valences resides in the fact that, at base, it points to an epistemological complexity, if not a conundrum: namely, that of representing not a subject or a thing but processes, functions, and relations.17 What one perceives in “Les Effarés”— barely, but undeniably, and purely aesthetically, if not phonetically, as a kind of white noise troubling the poem’s surface composition—is a critique not so much of an individual subject but of a system; running through the poem is the denunciation of a social order, an “ogre industriel,” that “eats the poor” with no regard for age or social station and that transforms labor—a potentially meaningful, even artistic, activity or cultural feld where the sacred and the quotidian converge—into a grinding source of alienation, if not an objective form of violence subtending social relations as such. To return to the text’s incipit, if we keep in perspective the Freudian insight into the relationship between scenes of specularity and fantasies of knowledge (Freud, “From the History”), we might in turn speculate as to why, as readers,

17. Whatever else it may signal, this baker may well also be a kind of fguration of the Rimbaldian project of voyance, which implies a dérèglement des sens at the level of writing and a willingness to read simultaneously littéralement et dans tous les sens on the part of the reader. On a meta-discursive level, then, we might think of the baker, and the (perhaps irresolvable) horizons and limits of interpretability he signposts, precisely as a fgure, as a kind of allegory of the task of interpretation, the interminable search for intelligibility constitutive of literary analysis, built into the heart of the poem. The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 93

we are placed so visibly in the imaginary position of seeing somebody see something. That is, we might begin the poem by asking why it is that Rimbaud draws our gaze downward to these “inquiétantes taches noires” (as Baudelaire might have put it), to these effarés peeping in on a bakery. For in this gesture, he also draws attention to our meta-discursive position as voyeurs, as readers of a text that comically pulls the hermeneutic rug out from under our feet at the last possible moment—that is, just when we might have expected to encounter a kind of semantic consolidation allowing us to make sense of the poem, its open buffet of misérabliste clichés, and its moral (or moralizing message, perhaps). Instead, we fnd ourselves before a kind of lacuna, or lack, that is perhaps nothing but the semantic equivalent of the formalization of poverty at the heart of the poem itself; a lack that we may only be able to “fll in” on the condition of rereading the text, deferring the moment of disclosure of (a) meaning that needs to be renegotiated practically as soon as it is encountered. (That is, it is only by a nonlinear mode of reading that we manage to get anywhere with “Les Effarés.”) Repetition and retrospective recoding of meaning are not only two technical dimensions or invariants involved in countless accounts of the comic (Freud, Jokes; Zupanˇci ˇc 139–45), but they appear to form something like a formal structure at the heart of Rimbaud’s poem. As Rocher indicates in two meticulous studies of the poem’s complex architecture, the text’s twelve tercets are organized in such a way that by the time the reader reaches the fnal, burlesque tercet, or faux-sizain, the poem has been repeating itself (with a contrastive difference, one might say) all along (“Composition”).18 The entire text is shot through with morpho-lexical parallelisms and syntagmatic echoes following a rigorously chiasmic logic, essentially transforming the text into a kind of proleptic loop, or trou, articulated around a pivotal intersection at stanzas six and seven, both of which anaphorically open on similar adverbial/locative groups, are prosodically linked by interweaving assonant and alliterative echoes (“Quand sous/Quand ce trou”), and contain sememes situated in proximate lexico-semantic felds: “quand sous les poutres enfumées/ quand ce trou chaud souffe la vie” (Rocher, “Les possibilités” 310). Upon rereading, signs that something “funny” is indeed afoot in “Les Effarés” appear quite early on in the text. For reasons having to do with the tension between the rhyme and strophic structures—that is, the gap between the somewhat repressed sizains organizing the rhyme structure and the tercets into which the stanzas are graphically distributed, a gap creating a persistent phenomenon of phonetic and prosodic deferral—as

18. To highlight but one example from Rocher’s studies of “Les Effarés,” note the lexical, phonological, and syntagmatic correspondences in the frst and last tercets of the poem: Noirs/ neige/ leurs culs/ au grand soupirail ++ blanc/hiver/ leur culotte / Au vent. 94 Robert St. Clair well as with the constitutive brevity of the metrical mix of octosyllables and quadrisyllables, interlinear and interstrophic enjambments are the prosodic rule rather than the exception in “Les Effarés.”19 The fnal quadrisyllabic line of the frst tercet ends, for instance, with a weakly punctuated, enjambed adverbial clause: “Au grand soupirail qui s’allume / leur culs en rond.” Each rhythmic unit here is occupied by a single sememe, creating a weirdly clunky (parodic?), staccato burst of monosyllables, a kind of lyrical stammering that, paradoxically, plays the role of articulator between the poem’s stanzas. (With the exception of lines twenty-one and twenty-four—“et les grillons [. . .] sous leurs haillons”—each quadrisyllable follows the same rhythmic and lexical pattern: 1/1/1/1.) Commenting on this structure of disruption and slippage in her formidable study of poverty and poetry in nineteenth-century France, Anne Berger draws our attention to how this logic of dislocations manages to (almost imperceptibly) foreground the decidedly unlyrical lexeme: “leurs culs en rond.” The poem thus fguratively, and not a little mischievously, opens up “par (ou sur) le cul” (Berger 228). Similarly, the emotive interjection, misère, to which the poet insistently draws our attention through punctuation and its position at the rhyme in line four, seems, retrospectively, if not like a bit of auto-parodic indexing, then at least a little suspicious, if not excessive.20 It is quite as though the poem were announcing itself to an imagined or imaginary reader—the type who might typically “eat” this sort of social and emotional stuff up, but who also may need some heavy-handed metaleptic guidance in order to “read” the scene properly: “Here you go,” it would appear to say, “this is misérabilisme. Eat your heart out.” (Of course, the risk here is that one ends up a sans-coeur, which is perhaps also why we ought to read “misère” in this context as a purely phatic textual function, striving to open a subterranean channel of communication with the reader.) And à propos of misérabilisme, both Murphy (Stratégies 110) and Berger (225–27) have located potential points of resonance linking “Les Effarés” to at least two poems by Victor Hugo, suggesting that one compelling way of reading “Les Effarés” is as a parodic takedown of the latter’s “Le Mendiant” (Contemplations, 1856) and “Rencontre” (Les Rayons et les Ombres, 1840). Indeed, Hugo’s “Mendiant” begins “un pauvre homme passait dans le givre et le vent” and somewhat similarly ends on an image of perforated clothing. And there is indeed a sense in which we might understand Rimbaud’s poem

19. This heterometric mix of octosyllables and quadrisyllables not only adheres to a general logic of what Murat identifes as the “littérarisation de la métrique du chant” but also anticipates a distribution of meters characteristic of the “grands poèmes satiriques et politiques de 1871,” from “Chant de guerre parisien” to the texts of the Album zutique (81–82). 20. As indeed one of the connotations of the etymon miserum suggests (Berger 25). The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 95 as a mode of rewriting that submits Hugo’s pensive “encounter” with “quatre enfants—oui, sans père ni mère” to a kind of satirical economy of infation and exaggeration. (We might even detect a subtle, paronomastic proximity between the “immonde vieillard” in Hugo’s Rencontre and the outdated melody, the vieil air, that Rimbaud’s baker is singing in the middle of the night in “Les Effarés.”)21 As many a critic has noted, the parodic occupies a truly cortical dimension of Rimbaud’s poetic corpus (Murphy, “Détours”; Brunel; Whidden, “J’aime”; Sangsue). Parody, satire, irony, (verbal) caricature, and pastiche play such crucial roles in Rimbaud’s corpus that without taking into account these fgures and tropes of internal difference, citationality, and “perversifcation,”22 the poet’s work remains on some fundamental level inscrutable (as we know, this game of deterritorialization can extend as far as auto-parody/pastiche in the Album zutique, if not to the metrical dismantling of earlier works in the prose poems of Une saison en enfer). At the very least, we can agree with Murphy when he argues that part of the stakes involved in “Les Effarés” are deeply parodic, perhaps ultimately constituting a refusal, as he wittily remarks, to “manger ce pain misérabiliste” (Stratégies 115). Perhaps indeed what “Les Effarés” accomplishes frst and foremost is to problematize, or transform into a non-lieu, the topos of poverty in nineteenth-century poetry. It’s a poem that perhaps derides a certain kind of poetics, if not a poet (a hack, as Benjamin might put it) who earns his bread crafting lachrymogenic verse, transforming even the struggle against poverty—that is, revolutionary struggle—into a commodity, an “object for contemplative enjoyment,” all while ignoring, or remaining indifferent to, the material conditions in which his or her oeuvre is produced (Benjamin 232). Such a reading may present the added beneft of accounting for the ostentatious metrical emphasis placed on the question of creative activity, or the faire (rhyming with misère) in the incipit of “Les Effarés.” (For indeed, if we go back to the Greek root, the baker’s “faire” is a form of poieisis.) Rimbaud’s “Effarés” follows a kind of surprisingly Parnassian logic of poetic depersonalization, whereas the Hugolian hypotexts place the lyrical “je” front and center—a foregrounding of the lyrical subject that results in representations of poverty and poetry that render legible the poet’s insistent, unconscious inscription of his social difference and distance from the impoverished, his emotional voyeurism, if not, as Murphy perspicaciously suggests (Stratégies 110–15), his occasional

21. In Hugo’s poem, one of the little beggars ends up singing, “sous sa pâleur malsaine [. . .] sans la comprendre, une chanson obscène / Pour faire rire—hélas ! lui qui pleure en secret ! - / quelque immonde vieillard au seuil d’un cabaret” (Rayons 266–67). 22. To gloss Philippe Rocher’s excellent neologism “la subversification” (“Les possibilités” 285). 96 Robert St. Clair

(ironic) deafness to the speech of the poor: “Et je regardais, sourd à ce que nous disions, / sa bure où je voyais des constellations.”23 Where Hugo, then, turns his gaze upward in both the aforementioned poems, to the unfathomable realm of eidos (to the ideal, the idyllic, the ideological), Rimbaud turns his bien bas: toward the light of an oven that appears as a “ciel rouvert,” a veritable paradise on earth taking on the appearance of a vulgar trou (sememe of lack par excellence, repeated three times over the course of the poem and whose constitutive vocalic sound, [u], occurs twenty-two times from beginning to end).24 Not that Rimbaud is content to set up a stable divide between the ideal and the material. Rather, this fnal luminescent image collapses the one into the other, such that whatever it is that the light of heaven and ovens signify is also wrapped up with the idea and earthy phenomenonality of a “trou.” Rather than jerk on our tears, Rimbaud hits a dialectical nerve—he hits our funny bone (which, after all, can be pretty painful). The question we ought to account for, then, is the following: What’s at stake in this move from pathos to bathos that culminates in the fnal tercet of “Les Effarés”? Is the poem just a “cheeky” parody taking the wind out of misérabilisme’s tendency toward shameless tear-jerkery and puffed-up rhetoric?25 Just who or what is the “butt” of the joke here? Of course, no small part of the humor involved has to do with being caught in the moderately unanticipated readerly position of being mooned by these

23. That said, Rimbaud’s insistence on playing metrical limits and convention against prosody and syntax by multiplying the instances of metrical rupture (i.e., enjambment, rejet, and contre-rejet) undeniably bears the mark of a (somewhat radicalized) project of lyrical materialism that was perhaps, as Alain Vaillant suggests, frst announced by Hugo in the preface to Cromwell (Vaillant 58–64). 24. Perhaps the comic warning Rimbaud addresses to poetry (if not to fellow poets) is not to spend so much time contemplating the heavens that one tumbles, Thales-like, headlong into an ignominious trou. For her part, Anne-E. Berger locates a fascinating paragrammatical inscription of this “trou,” tracing its dissemination throughout the poem such that it ends up constituting something like its fantasmatic phonemic kernel, or semonce (228). In some sense, chez Rimbaud, the “trou” always has a double comical-critical function (we’ll leave aside the erotic for present purposes): that of designating the “gouffre,” as well as the “voûte célèste” and any ideological metonym of it—poets, priests, the Prudhommesque, and so on—as profoundly trivial, if not simply laughable. I am indebted to her for these remarks. On the (il)legibility of the fnal lumières du/de ciel, see Murphy (Stratégies 112–15). 25. In fnal analysis, that would already be quite signifcant. The parodic (pre)supposes, after all, a complex game of appropriation, parasitism, subversion, and even destruction of a target-text/discourse, along with a desire to give form to, or to render perceptible, something (or some subject) in the target that constitutes its disavowed principle of intelligibility (Denith 1–39; Grojnowski 9–33). The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 97

cinq petits effarés.26 Indeed, as Freud noted in his 1905 study on jokes and the unconscious, no joke succeeds without at least a minimal element of surprise. Proper witz always involves the surprise of a certain excess of pleasure (an unexpected supplement of meaning), as well as a pleasure in the very surprise produced by this excess itself (Freud, Jokes 95–96, 131). Which brings us to what we might call the chute of Rimbaud’s poem and the order of laughter it elicits in the fnal line. There’s a well-known paradox involved in explaining why something makes us laugh—notably, that the object in question typically ceases eo ipso to be funny at all. Nevertheless, following Simon Critchley’s insight, we might schematically say that there are (at least) three ways in which, or reasons for which, we fnd things funny in the West27: (1) a reason having to do with our ominous sense of superiority over others (the Hobbesian theory), (2) a reason having to do with the incongruity between expectations and outcomes (Kant, inter alii), and (3) a reason having to do with “relief” (Freud)—with the transformation of tension into pleasure and with sublimated forms of insurrection against authority (Critchley 2–4). “Les Effarés” perhaps simultaneously plays itself out on, or displays, all three of these levels in order to level a serious question at the reader. It toys with the incongruity of a great build-up resulting in the surprise of shattered expectations (Kant). However, it perhaps does so precisely in order to reintroduce the dimension of the Hobbesian comic, implicitly provoking the (imagined/imaginary) reader to refect upon his or her activity qua readers; to not only consider why they might be laughing but perhaps also suggest that our laughter may have to do with an unconscious (or disavowed) sense of “superiority” with respect to the exposed frailty of these impoverished little bodies, these fgures par excellence of vulnerability in the nineteenth-century imaginary (Berger 38). In this respect, “Les Effarés” is perhaps, above all, a text that instantiates a certain ex-centric mode of writing—one that splits

26. The terminal line of the poem is perhaps the site where it is most “open” to a Bakhtinian reading of the poem as a lyrical carnival uncrowning authoritative poetic models, authors, or fgures of authority. As Bakhtin put it in his study of Rabelais, the very image of the grotesque body is, in addition to an undecidably blurred caesura between the animal and the human, that of a cavity (whether oral or anal). The body in carnival, the philosopher notes, is one that “ignore la surface sans faille” (314–15). 27. For the purposes of this intervention, we’re deliberately going to leave aside Bergson’s deeply complex account of laughter and the comic as du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant even if some of his remarks from that essay on, say, clothing, or the décalage between the élan vital and the tantalizing and monotonously stupid needs of the body, obviously do leave open potentially rich hermeneutical avenues for “Les Effarés.” 98 Robert St. Clair itself off into a refection on the activity of reading, on the production and uncritical consumption of discourse in modern society (that is, in the golden age of unreliability, hypocrisy, and irony that saw, along with the triumphal rise of the bourgeoisie and fnance capital, the advent of modern journalism, the commodifcation of artistic activity, advertising, political discourse, and indeed propaganda).28 As Alenka Zupan ˇci ˇc suggests in her account of the comic, every chute always radically and suddenly implies the reader/listener at once in the question and construction of meaning (140–42). We might suppose, then, that what the joke “hits,” the object of the punch-line in “Les Effarés,” is the reader as a kind of subject, if not indeed the discourse of misérabilisme as the ideological matrix in which the kind of subjects are produced whose response to poverty is more likely to take the form of highly complex, internal, individualized, and virtual sympathy rather than a potentially more disruptive social form of solidarity and engagement (Berger 49; Eagleton, “The Subject” 96; Murphy, Stratégies 110). The question addressed to the reader of Rimbaud’s text is thus quite literally one about the social practices underpinning and implied in laughter and reading: How is it that we manage to fnd meaning in this spectacle of senseless suffering? It’s a question addressed to a literary subject in every sense of the term, one that calls into question a topic, a theme, a cliché-ridden discursive formation (i.e., misérabilisme), but that also interrogates the contradictory idealism of the reader’s value system. The text ultimately questions whether we can simultaneously experience imaginary compassion for the poor while insisting that poverty doesn’t concern us (or, ne nous regarde pas). Such contradictory idealism—the ideological and literary emblem of which would be a misérabiliste poetic discourse at once full of hot air (or, fatus) and strangely indifferent to what the poor actually seem to say (which infantilizes them in a symbolic, social, and etymological sense)—is here comically but devastatingly embodied in a base image of the body; one that provokes laughter (the convulsively material response of the reader’s body) in order to force the reader to refect upon (and thus witness, attend to) poverty and lack not as some sort of unfortunate but freakish hapax within the social formation we call capitalism, but rather as its miserum: the particularly excessive and, as even Hegel put it, social expression of the wrong one class does to another in the course of the private accumulation of wealth.29

28. It is arguably in this self-refexive splitting that Rimbaud’s poem comes into the territory of the (restricted) comic adumbrated by Baudelaire’s essay on the essence of laughter. For a truly remarkable analysis of irony, the motif and problem of splitting, experience and trauma in Baudelaire’s essay, see Newmark. 29. Hegel argues in his Philosophy of Right that “when the standard of living of a large mass of people falls below a certain subsistence level [. . .] necessary for a member of The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 99

Rimbaud manages to strategically embody this “social wrong” in his text in (at least) two moments or images: frst in the children’s culottes crevées, and second in the curious, bestializing description of their museaux roses coll[és] au grillage. Poverty thus metonymically emerges as a form of dehumanizing exclusion (or perhaps more allusively, as a bêtise), if not imprisonment—a kind of (Hugolian) stereotype in nineteenth-century pauperography to be sure. However, the haillons trembling in the wind at the end of the poem simultaneously stage and trouble the split between inside and outside, quite in the same way that the fnal image of the text—of the children out in the snow, the seams of their pants split open—both foregrounds and undermines from within this very division or partage. This conjugation of ripped rags and the bars of a soupirail, of course, draws our attention to the animalistic nakedness of the effarés. But it also highlights the role of clothing as an eminently social supplement protecting the body from exposure to the elements, if not, as Berger suggests in her reading of “À une mendiante rousse,” from its elementary animality (157). What is clothing, in other words, if not one of those metonyms that suggests, particularly when it wears down or rips open, something of the sad strangeness of the human condition: that we are at once indisputably fnite beings, more than a little animal(istic), but beings that cannot by that token be reduced to our biology. The haillons in “Les Effarés” signpost the precise, material form of excess over itself, the constitutive splitting into the in-fnite, or at the very least into the poorly defned beings of lack that designate what it means to be human. Never immediately rooted in our relations to ourselves, others, or the world, we always also need to be “covered” by some form of supplement, whether it be clothing or that tissue of words, identity, and alterity that we call language. As in “Les Reparties de Nina,”30 the dehumanizing description of les effarés is perhaps in fnal determination less a mode of caricatural cruelty than it is an encryption. For the very move by which the signifer “museau” disfgures the legible humanity of the “effarés” also allows the poet to trope, or fgure, the class to which these children belong—an impossible class, the subject of what Marx calls a “wrong as such,” and which, for the moment, lacks a voice, is infans, but which, revealingly, does not lack a song (“chantant des choses/ entre les trous/ mais bien bas . . .”). Indeed, le museau pressed up against the society [. . .] the result is the creation of a rabble of paupers [Pöbel]. At the same time, this brings with it, at the other end of the social scale, conditions which greatly facilitate the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands [. . .]. Against nature a human being can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class [Klasse] by another” (150, 277–78). 30. Another heterometric poem with a “joke-like” structure in which we fnd a fat baby with a “museau blanc.” 100 Robert St. Clair bars of the bakery window inscribes these children within the category of the proletariat, or the proles—that is, as Berger notes, “le nourisson, et en particulier de l’animal” (38).

Conclusion: Rimbaud’s corps utopiques At the risk of winding down on a cliché, we might say that one of the more intriguing dimensions of the chute of the “Effarés” is a certain highlighting of our ideological (pre)positions as readers. In a word, it asks us to consider whether we are laughing at these children or with them. The answer to this question, furthermore, cannot be a priori anticipated by the logic or construction of the text. Rather, everything hinges on the question of readerly complicity (whom are we reading with).31 After all, we could read and laugh in sympathy with les effarés, but perhaps only on the condition that we take the determinant in the title (“Les Effarés”) as literally constituting a category (les gens de rien) that designates something human at its most rudimentary, something universal precisely to the degree that it is excluded from any particular position in the social (its mode of inclusion in society is exclusion, in other words).32 It may even be possible to argue that poetry is allegorically on the side of the dispossessed here—particularly if we read the syntagma “chantant des choses/ entre les trous, / mais bien bas” as a moment of textual self-fguration; as a moment of the text, of poetry, placing itself on the lips of those who stare with empty stomachs in wide-eyed stupefaction (effarement) at their exclusion from the earthly paradise of a bakery (to say nothing of their access to panem quotidianem). Such ambivalence is central to the poem’s literary politics, for it allows the reader the possibility of being actively complicit in the text’s denunciation of a callous social order whose unspoken values and practices leave such subjects as the “cinq petits misère[s]” out in the cold; it sustains the possibility of identifying with these children.33 One might fnally argue that, once we are in the pre-position of identifying (a certain shared condition) with the other, with

31. I borrow this concept, or fgure, of readerly complicity from Ross Chambers’s groundbreaking work, The Writing of Melancholy (1993). 32. That is, a subject extremely close to what Jacques Rancière conceptualizes as the sans-part in many of his works. 33. Recalling once more that laughter is a profoundly social, if not socializing, act of partage in every contradictory sense of that term—of partage as division between self and other (consider sexist or racist or homophobic jokes, for instance); partage indeed as the split residing within the subject itself (as Baudelaire suggests in his essay on laughter); but partage too as a share of pleasure, a form of social poieisis in its own right. The Utopian Body in Rimbaud 101

these fgures of absolute poverty, with the crapule, we are well on our way to making a radically utopian demand: that of altering the social order as such; perhaps, as Fredric Jameson suggests, to the point of making it fundamentally unrecognizable (Archaeologies 147). For, and in this resides both the arcane paradox and the indispensable critical aspect of the utopian, we can indeed desire or imagine a world without effarés. Such a world, however, would always already be a radically different, other world—one having already abandoned both an ethics and a logic derived from the calculi of the market, to say nothing of practices of exploitation or the systemic, economic necessity of poverty (and everything that that presupposes and entails on the order of pre-conditions and consequences). Rimbaud’s “Effarés” gives us a glimpse of just such an ethical, indeed utopian, demand—a radical claim upon us that we attend to each other as fnite, creaturely beings whose narratives, needs, and desires are mutually implicated in each other. Such heart-stirring humanism, what’s more, is not only crucial for our survival (to say nothing of our fourishing)—in the right set of circumstances, it may even be downright revolutionary. As Marx frst argued in The German Ideology, it is “only in community with others [that] each individual [enjoys] the means of cultivating his/her gifts in all directions” (83).34 In radically transformed social conditions, in other words, my fourishing as a member of a common human race might not have to come at the expense of yours any more than I would be an obstacle to yours. Rather, in this utopian scenario, your destiny and mine would be inextricably intermingled in each other as social relations—relations that will only ever blossom when, through collective struggle, we cut the Gordian knot of scarcity, perhaps eventually, as Marx frst suggested, by doing something as simple (and as radical) as “shorten[ing] the working day” (qtd. in Eagleton, Marx 21). “Ne remuez pas les bottes,” Rimbaud might have added. It is ultimately at that curious intersection of the world, self, and other that we call our bodies that we frst catch a glimpse of what we might call Rimbaud’s utopian literary politics: the way a poem critically sutures itself to its social situation—its con/co-text—counter-discursively interpreting, commenting on, and symbolically challenging, if not changing, it. In poems such as “Les Effarés” we get a glimpse of the body intersecting with the social to form a kind of eu-topos: a surface of inscriptions and interrogations where the tragic disorder of the “given” is at once made legible, linked to the struggles, sufferings, and injustices of the past (“Le Forgeron”), and upon

34. This claim also forms the basis of Terry Eagleton’s suggestive argument that for the Marx of the Economic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology, the intersection of ethics, utopia, and species-being is in fnal analysis a kind of aesthetic practice (Eagleton 20–27). 102 Robert St. Clair which the desire for a golden age to come is given form (“Au Cabaret-vert”). We get a glimpse, in other words, both of how the body and the social are, and of how they might, or ought to be: lazy, happy, warm, and well fed. Less a fait du corps than a fête du corps. And that’s perhaps no laughing matter at all.

The College of William and Mary

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