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  • Du Nouveau chez Rimbaud by Eddie Breuil
  • Bridget Behrmann
Du Nouveau chez Rimbaud. By Eddie Breuil. (Essais, 43.) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. 196pp., ill.

In this slim essay, Eddie Breuil advances a provocative claim regarding the ensemble of texts long known as Rimbaud’s Illuminations: ‘Rimbaud n’est pas l’auteur mais le scribe, scribe de l’autre écrivain présent durant ces copies: Nouveau’ (pp. 164–65). The copyist of ‘Métropolitain’ and part of ‘Villes (l’acropole officielle)’, Germain Nouveau was also the designated recipient of manuscripts passed from Rimbaud to Verlaine in 1875. Breuilthus proposes a dramatic promotion for Nouveau, from helpmeet to the texts’ sole author. The first part of his argument questions the series of hypotheses about the forty-three manuscripts currently edited under the title of Illuminations, while tracing how theories hardened into established ‘facts’. Demystifying the ‘vulgate actuelle’ (p. 47) of the Illuminations, Breuil provides a welcome reminder that the collection is above all a scholarly convention. Breuil’s scepticism towards Verlaine’s problematic statements, and their advocates, prompts readers to recall that the texts’ grouping, title, dating, and genesis all remain unproven; however, once he moves to disprove their accepted authorship by analysing the manuscripts themselves, his discussion falters. Breuil studies apparent corrections on the clean copies, presumably made from earlier drafts; he argues that errors made in Nouveau’s hand suggest copying from dictation, while errors in Rimbaud’s hand suggest an inability to understand drafts that were not his own. According to Breuil, Rimbaud either could not read the drafts in Nouveau’s difficult handwriting, or could not comprehend them, creating incoherencies. These corrections — Breuil selects eleven, drawn from eight poems — testify not to simple mistakes but instead, in his view, demonstrate that Rimbaud could not have authored the texts he copied. Breuil prefers prosaic coherence to the texts’ famous illisibilité, as when he contends that ‘la main de la campagne sur mon épaule’ in ‘Vies’ is ‘une confusion’ rather than a ‘figure poétique’ (p. 78). Similarly, the final section proposes that the Illuminations ‘répondent à une vision cohérente de la réalité, à une position maladive du poète, aspirant à s’émerveiller dans les festivités modernes’ (p. 113). Breuil relies on Nouveau’s biography, from childhood loss to later interests in painting, theatre, and Paris’s Jardin Mabille, to ground several short thematic readings. Yet even without taking into account the brilliant work of Noland, Ross, Scott, and others exploring féerie, subjectivity, and visuality in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, one may doubt that the presence of death as poetic theme testifies definitively to Nouveau’s unique vision. These pages do offer evidence that Nouveau was a contributing force during the texts’ elaboration: Breuil shows that the mysterious ‘baou’ of ‘Dévotion’ is a Provençal word, for example, and unveils certain historical details of Parisian culture that ring true. This book makes a convincing case for Nouveau — not as the Illuminations’ sole author, but rather as a neglected presence. Given the recent scholarship that has emphasized Rimbaud’s collaborative practices, this essay is most successful as a starting point for rethinking how the poetic relationship between Rimbaud and Nouveau shaped a corpus, since called the Illuminations.

Bridget Behrmann
Princeton University
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