Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self by James Lawler (review)

102Rocky Mountain Review differences between psychosis and neurosis. His introductory chapter offers a valuable discussion of his famous Schema L illustrating the structure of intersubjectivity. Throughout, Lacan is the witty, forthright Lacan of the 1950s seminars, rather than the convoluted, complex Lacan of the Écrits. With Book III, The Psychoses Russell Grigg offers psychoanalytic critics and post-structural theorists alike the best of the Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Together with Seminars I and II, Seminar III offers a solid critical grounding in Lacan's mature theory—a necessary antidote to the abundant overuse of the earlier and limited mirror stage essay. Grigg's translation should change the face, perhaps even the fate, of Lacan studies in America. TAMISE VAN PELT University ofIllinois, at Urbana-Champaign JAMES LAWLER. Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 245 p. James Lawler has a deservedly high reputation as a critic and scholar whose multitudinous studies range over various literatures, echoing the resources of intertextuality. Lawler is best known for his extensive works on Claudel and Rimbaud. The finesse with which he interpreted their works by means of close examination of the linguistic innovations, his sure grasp of the texts, his feeling for the most minute shades of diction, his steady focus on the historical, philosophical and aesthetic facts, find full expression in Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self. This luminous, profound, and stimulating work, the fruit of deliberations over 30 years, is his most significant book. It is a work of exceptional importance for students of Rimbaud and for anyone concerned with past and future hopes for breaking with slave society and salvaging the creative spirit which proceeds from human totality, when all the creative synergies—the poetic sense, the moral sense, and the intellectual sense—converge in the poet's vision and act. The poet's creative self is shown to originate in the ecstasy of a pre-conceptual spiritual state of the intellect, and poetic creativity is shown to re-establish a relationship of interp énétration between nature and self. James Lawler proposes fresh readings of Rimbaud's "Le Bateau ivre" and illustrates the project of self-dramatization, the struggle of knowledge and desire "corresponding to the gesture of surrender of self to sea and stars to ocean, the drowned man espouses the scheme of immersion like the drunken boat . . ." (24). Lawler is convinced that "every subsequent French poem of spiritual autobiography, be it Valéry's 'Sinistre,' or Claudel's 'Ballade,' or Apollinaire's 'Zone,' or Cendrars' 'Prose du Transsibérien,' measures itselfwith respect to 'Le Bateau ivre.' " (39). Creative experience, wedded to the theatre of his lived and imaginary existence, transforms his poetry into a self-reflexive act, questioning the philosophical dimension of Existence and Essence in "un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement" (40) Book Reviews103 of all senses and lifting the creator to go beyond any realistic borderline. With his study of "Michel et Christine," Lawler surpasses Etimble's, Yassu Gauclière's, and Pierre Brunei's analyses in assuming the growing emotion of the sacred apprehension of the religious. Lawler asks himself, what is creative sensibility? For him, "Enfance" presents the imagination that comes to maturity, "Jeunesse" the struggle with the poem, when the poet explores the bond between poetry and the world, and when the inner world is found in the outer world, the outer in the inner. In a hymn to artistic creation , "each section prepares the ultimate affirmation that gathers all the resources of the self-Apollonian and Dionysian, architectural and musical, physical and metaphysical, formal and sensuous . . ." (103). Lawler sees in "Vies" irony, and in "Angoisse" he finds Rimbaud questioning the self, world, fate. In a supreme enactment of creative anxiety, Rimbaud seems to be working out the implications ofLes Fleurs du mal, and Lawler, therefore, places "Angoisse" between Kierkegaard and Char. With the prose poems "Being Beauteous" and "Devotion," Lawler stresses a cycle of spiritual renewal as experienced by the creative sensibility. Lawler, in Rimbaud's Theatre ofthe Self, shows the expansion and evolution of a creative imagination, which is sensual, dynamic, and spiritual. What matters to Rimbaud, according to Lawler, is the mutual entanglement of...