Rimbaud: The Cost of Genius (review)

In his short book, Neal Oxenhandler approaches the writings of Arthur Rimbaud from a psychoanalytical point of view. His method is quite a simple one in that he takes a number of texts from all areas of the canon and subjects them to readings that are heavily informed by psychoanalytical ideas about the child, the family, the oedipal complex, the absent father and so on. He relies on psychoanalysts like Leo Bersani and a small number of Rimbaldian critics such as James Lawler, André Guyaux and Yves Bonnefoy to supplement his argument. What emerges are readings of the poems that sporadically offer interesting ideas but which for the most part remain terse, underdeveloped and at times contentious. Oxenhandler’s book is subdivided into a series of sections which look successively at the early poetry, some of the Illuminations and, at greater length, Une saison en enfer. Leaving aside the obvious issue of whether one feels able to subscribe to this psychoanalytical treatment of Rimbaud, there is a very uneven quality to the book in that in its discussion of individual texts it often seems to make a few observations about a given poem only to leave much of salient importance unsaid. For example, many of the poems seem to be reduced to certain parameters in order to fit them into the author’s overview of what was going on in Rimbaud’s mind when he wrote them. Oxenhandler predictably cites Freud on many occasions, relying heavily on the notions of chiasmus and sublimation but, interestingly, also argues throughout his study that Rimbaud anticipates Martin Heidegger. The tortured relationship between the poet and his mother Vitalie Cuif lies at the heart of Oxenhandler’s approach as he explores ‘the unresolved oedipal triad of the child and his parents’ (p. 48). One finds some interesting analysis as where ‘Honte’, ‘Angoisse’ and ‘Aube’ are all discussed as poems of ‘abreaction’ or ‘the impulsive movement away from a negative condition or feeling’ (p. 74). Although ‘H’ has often been construed as a masturbation fantasy, Oxenhandler takes this interpretation further and offers a more detailed explanation of how the text can be seen as a journey towards jouissance. There are useful readings of ‘Nocturne vulgaire’ and ‘Conte’ before we come to ‘Génie’ where the author draws the various threads of his psychoanalytical approach together in a study of the text that posits the notion of the ego-ideal (p. 98) as central to this poem which is usually seen as the final text in the Illuminations. Seeing ‘Génie’ as a culmination of a rationalist tradition involving Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon and Marx, Oxenhandler views the poem as ‘a celebration of reverence for human possibilities’ (p. 100). In summary, one might conclude that this brief volume does indeed offer some useful insights into Rimbaud’s work but one’s overall impression is of a study that is too understated and too much in hock to its overarching theory to achieve anything other than a minor place in Rimbaud’s critical bibliography.