Rimbaud “littéralement et dans tous les sens.” Hommage à Gérard Martin et Alain Tourneux (review)

One of the latest publications in Classiques Garnier’s dix-neuvièmiste series is a fine, if in parts uneven, collection of essays brought together as an homage to Gérard Martin and Alain Tourneux (the head curators of the libraries and museums in Arthur Rimbaud’s native Charleville-Mézières, respectively): Rimbaud “littéralement et dans tous les sens.”

In its 300 pages, micrological readings of texts and documents running the gamut from early verse production to the Illuminations lie alongside archival inventories, a philological commentary on a list of German vocabulary that Rimbaud compiled circa 1875 (Esa Christine Hartmann, 141–58) and the reproduction of an 1878 letter written from a monastery atop the Alps. It is a remarkably heterogeneous collection. And though some documents in the collection will doubtless prove to be of limited interest to an audience motivated by critical analysis of Rimbaud’s poetry, there are nevertheless a number of impressive and wide-ranging contributions which make this volume excellent for library collections.

Among the stand-out contributions are Yann Frémy’s Deleuzian-inspired analysis of the conjunction of the spiritual, the sensual and the verbal in Rimbaud’s (ultimately aporetic) poetic project of emancipation (127–141), as well as Yves Reboul’s piece on the question of the dates of composition of Illuminations. Jean-Luc Steinmetz offers a perspicacious account of Mauvais sang as a kind of “lutte contre tout ce qui rend esclave,” strategically foregrounding emancipatory struggles as well as the alterity within poetic enunciation in Rimbaud (293–301). Steve Murphy’s analysis of the oscillation between revolutionary/utopian aspirations and melancholic withdrawal in the urban cycle prose poems in Illuminations is a must-read situated somewhere at impeccable equidistance between a trenchant intervention into socio-cultural (counter)history and the sort of rigorous close readings that are this author’s stock-and-trade (227–45).

Finally, we might highlight contributions by Manami Imura, Philippe Rocher and Patrick Talierco. Imura’s reading of the problem of value, equivalency and the imaginary of the elsewhere in (the late) Marx and Rimbaud in the light of their “climat commun”—with particular attention to the figure of Robinson Crusoe—is an innovative (and perhaps overdue) archeology of the lateral connections between these two key figures of what, glossing Étienne Balibar, we might call anti-philosophy and anti-poetry, respectively. One might quibble with her handling of the question of value and the function of irony in Capital, but on the whole she offers a suggestive cartography of a climat commun that remains to be mapped.

If the technical dimension of Rocher’s work can at times be formidable in his “Accroupissements et la poétique de la caricature,” the pay-off for patient attention to the arc of his argument is enormous. In a powerful and at times playful study of the early Rimbaud, Rocher methodically tracks a series of linguistic structures and poetico-technical resonances across several surprising texts (and inter-texts) in order to offer us a study of the political, technical and aesthetic complexities of verbal caricature in the early Rimbaud (1870–1871) that will prove to be indispensable for future studies.

Much the same could be said of Patrick Talierco’s essay on the chaotic context in which “Le Rêve de Bismark”—a rare bit of Rimbaldian prose satire that Talierco himself discovered in 2008—was published in an Ardennais newspaper in the fall of 1870. In a compelling and insightful reading, Talierco ultimately suggests we might still be able to learn quite a bit about the political scope and referential situation of “Le Dormeur du val” by reading it alongside the satirical prose piece ridiculing Bismark as a “dernière tentation 4 septembriste”—that is, as a piece mapping out Rimbaud’s (if not the French left’s) slide towards revolutionary politics in the...