Politics and Poetics of the (Utopian) Body in Rimbaud's
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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