Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality by Aimée Israel-Pelletier (review)

This book, ranging widely across Rimbaud's verse and prose poetry, has at its core a concern with the visual as a source of structuring potential in the poet's oeuvre. At stake in Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics is not, however, 'mere observation' (p. 3). While earlier scholarship such as that by David Scott has revealed how Rimbaud's poetry sourced inspiration from pictorial models, one of the strengths of Aimée Israel-Pelletier's study is to shift enquiry beyond the strict properties of the image to the embodied, historicized act of looking as a factor of Rimbaud's poetics. The trajectory plotted across the texts is a familiar one, staging the transition from the relatively stable subject-world implied by the Poésies to the impossibly teeming vistas of Illuminations. Yet the distinctiveness of Israel-Pelletier's approach is to link these evolutions in Rimbaud's poetry to the emergence of new visualizing technologies (such as the kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, and the camera) and to Impressionism in the visual arts. An early chapter on the Poésies in the context of contemporary debates on visual realism sets the context for two substantial chapters on Impressionism. The tendency to alternate lengthy discussions of Impressionism on the one hand, and Rimbaud's poetry on the other, across successive paragraphs in these chapters can, however, read as rather forced and over-reliant on disciplinary boundaries that the argument itself aims to dismantle. A more dispersed organization of the material might have communicated more effectively how Impressionist strategies can be seen to work 'in and through' Rimbaud's texts. Nonetheless, persuasive comparisons are made between features of Rimbaud's prose poems and concepts such as the ébauche and 'strikingness' in the discourse of Impressionism. Although this approach seems to draw quite heavily on the work of Michael Fried, it succeeds in revealing anew the importance to Rimbaud's project of effects of incompletion or disruption over 'meaning as depth' (p. 97). Following recent work by Susan Harrow, one of the most fertile approaches to Rimbaud concerns the interplay of poetic creativity and affect, and this is developed in the penultimate chapter. Through recourse to the concept of the after-image in her reading of poems such as 'Aube' and 'Métropolitain', Israel-Pelletier makes a highly compelling contribution to our understanding of the affective component of visual sensation in Rimbaud, tracing as she does so the nineteenth-century shift away from classical optics to a new emphasis on the body as a producer of vision. A final chapter, 'After Poetry', speculates in interesting ways on the significance of Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry. The brevity and clarity with which the book's arguments are set forth are additionally worthy of mention. Beyond the book's undoubted appeal to scholars of Rimbaud, these aspects of the text should also make it a welcome point of reference for students who come to the poet with fresh eyes.