JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 1 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World: Rimbaud and Revolutionary Artifice  1 Author’s Note: This essay was first written in 1996 and updated for its present publication. Special thanks to Ann Lauterbach for her com- ments on the essay’s first draft back in the 1990s. Editor note: Photo credits and bio note at the end. Introduction  2 Walter Benjamin records, in his ‘Conversations with Brecht: Svend- borg Notes,’ the playwright’s interpretation of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘The Drunken Boat’:  3  [Brecht] compares [Johannes R.] Becher’s poem to Rimbaud’s. In the latter, he thought, Marx and Lenin, too – had they read it – would have detected the great historical movement of which it is an expression. They would have recognized very clearly that it does not describe the perambu- lations of an eccentric stroller, but the vagabond flight of a person who can no longer endure the limits of his class, which – with the Crimean War, the Mexican adventure – was beginning to open up exotic parts of the world to mercantile interests. To assim- Brecht and friends, Berlin, ilate the gesture of the unfettered May Day 1954 vagabond, putting his affairs in JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 2 the hands of chance and turning his back on society, was patently impossible for the stereotype of the proletarian fighter. [See Note 1]  4 The ‘stereotype’ Brecht was attacking was that of Becher himself – ‘When Becher says “I”, he believes himself – as president of the Union of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers in Germany – to be exemplary. Only no one wants to follow the example.’ Brecht had just been explaining to Benjamin how the writer becomes ‘proletar- ianized, and utterly so’ when ‘the development of his own means of production are concerned.’ [2] Though it is not clear in these notes what Brecht meant by ‘his own means of production’ – is this self-education? the tools of publishing? – Brecht implies that the writer, when writing, developing skills and even publishing, moves from the position of being a consumer to a producer, thus transcending an early class identification. Benjamin himself clar- ifies this position through an analysis of the newspaper, film and Brecht’s Versuche in ‘The Author as Producer’ (a paper Benjamin Brecht presented at The Institute for the Study of Fascism in April 1934, a few months before this passage of the ‘Svendborg Notes’ was written).  5 Brecht understands Rimbaud to have been the chronicler of this peculiar class mobility of the artist, though the poet is not engaged in the sort of collective, non-individualistic world struggle of, say, later poets such as the British Christopher Caudwell, Louis Aragon during the French Resistance, or the American George Oppen. That Rimbaud may have been overwhelmed but delighted by the contin- gencies of this historical movement is apparent in the poem’s most famous quatrain: ‘And from then on I bathed in the Poem / of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent, / devouring the green azure where, pale / and elated, a thoughtful drowned figure sometimes sinks. [3] The repetitions in the next group of quatrains, which all begin with the word ‘Je’ – Je sais, J’ai vu, J’ai reve, J’ai suivi – indi- cate more than the poet’s youthful pride in having ‘seen it all’ but 1  Walter Benjamin, Reflections (Schocken Books, 1978), pg. 204. 2   Benjamin, pg. 203. 3  Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works and Selected Letters, translated by Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pg. 115. JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 3 also his experience of ‘the game of possibilities’ (to borrow Baudril- lard’s phrase). The poet is in the center of language, at the nexus of the various exchanges that comprise the process of communication, and – in Brecht’s interpretation – is also a symptom of Capitalism’s internal contradictions.  6 In his short essay ‘Rimbaud as Capitalist Adventurer,’ Kenneth Rex- roth records a similar interpretation of the poem, but he is not quite so impressed with the goals of the young poet. Rexroth writes:  7  He applied to literature, and to litterateurs, the minute he laid eyes on them, the devastating methods of total exploitation described so graphically in the Communist Manifesto. Some of them were not very applicable. He ‘ran’ the vowels like he later ran guns to the Abyssinians, with dubious results. Usually, however, he was very successful – in the same way his contemporaries Jim Fiske and P.T. Barnum were successful. He did things to literature that had never been done to it before, and they were things which literature badly needed done to it… just like the world needed the railroads the Robber Barons did manage to provide. [4]  8 Though Rexroth does have kinder things to say about Rimbaud’s poetry — ‘Rimbaud [is] a sort of magician of the sensibility — of that specifically modern sensibility invented by Blake and Hölderlin and Baudelaire — and an innovator in syntax, the first thoroughly radical revealer of the poetic metalogic which is the universal char- acteristic of twentieth-century verse.’ – the implication is that Rim- baud’s poetic adventure was motivated by a similar sort of avidity that drove him as a trader.  9 Rexroth concludes: ‘The old monument to Rimbaud in Charleville ignores his poetry and memorializes him as the local boy who made good as a merchant and hero of French imperialism in the Africa where the aesthetes who were never good at business think he went to die unknown, holding the Ultimate Mystery at bay.’ This puts Rimbaud at an even greater distance from the image of the 4  Kenneth Rexroth, Bird In Bush: Obvious Essays (New York: New Directions, 1947), pg. 44. JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 4 ‘eccentric stroller’ that Brecht was negating; furthermore, it places him on the other side of the Marxist-Leninist imperialist equation.  10 Brecht saw the poet’s exploitation of the materials of language as necessary for the expression of the movement of history by a poet who is only a small part, a subject, of it (perhaps even as a member of the proletariat), but Rexroth, keeping in mind Rimbaud’s later career as a gunrunner and colonizer of Africa, sees the opportunist.  11 Rexroth also takes pains to refute the understanding of Rimbaud as ‘a sort of combination of Bakunin and St. John of the Cross’; this is in contrast to Brecht’s appreciation of Rimbaud’s anarchist (‘putting his affairs in the hands of chance’) aesthetic as the toppler of class and cultural hierarchies. Rimbaud fortified hierarchies in Rexroth’s view – he did not describe or experience a ‘derangement’ of language – ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’ in the original – that would eventually collapse bourgeois values and result in the more liberating forms of Modernism, but rather trapped and hoarded lan- guage in poems that would later be understood by the authorities – as well as the poets who would benefit from his formal innovations – as ‘Art.’  12 The poem, in this sense, became another coin for the piggy-banks of nationalists, who never understand art as anything more than the proof of a superior culture, symbolized by Rexroth by the statue of the young poet in Charleville.  13 While Rexroth’s misgivings – written in the heat of the Beat moment in 1957 – offer a valuable demystification of the life and work of Sketch of poet Arthur the poet, Brecht’s earlier assessment provides rich Rimbaud by Cazals ground for a consideration of Rimbaud’s work in re- lation to political thought. This essay compares Rimbaud’s concep- tion of the ‘alchemy of the word’ with Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s idea of the ‘image-complex’ as she describes it in her 1978 study JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 5 Poetic Artifice. Forrest-Thomson’s book provides a critical language for much of what is only implied in Rimbaud’s poem, in that it describes in semi-technical language the space of ‘non-meaning’ in a poem in which the worlds inside and outside a poem meet, while at the same time maintaining these dichotomies of ‘inside’ and ‘out- side’ – here and there – necessary for a theory of literary ‘alchemy.’ The work of American ‘language’ poets Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews is central to this argument, since their work is most singularly and directly concerned with the role the poet plays as arbiter of cultural values – whether as creator, destroyer, animator or aggravator. Countering Romanticism  14 A basic understanding of the Romantic concept of history can be gleaned from Shelley’s essay ‘A Defense of Poetry,’ in which civili- zation is understood to have had an ‘infancy’ from which the pres- ent civilization – through revolution and a progressive democratic liberation from tyranny – has derived. Shelley writes: ‘The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed.’ [5] The culture of Greece is understood as the foundation of all cultures following it – a sort of Platonic ideal of which later generations were merely flawed copies.  15 As Shelley implies here and elsewhere, the poet stood at the center of this culture, having illuminated the way that the more active agents in culture – the politicians, the warriors, the social architects – would take in shaping it. Shelley’s claim is that the poet is indis- tinguishable from the motion of history; earlier, he compares the work of poets to ‘the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an 5  ‘A Defense of Poetry,’ Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 1977), pg. 486. JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 6 Aeolian lyre,’ as if the poet were the mere plaything of the ‘gods,’ who, in a materialist view, are really just historical forces.  16 About fifty years after the ‘A Defense of Poetry’ was written, Rim- baud wrote ‘A Season In Hell,’ in which he expresses his disillusion- ment with this Romantic ideal. In ‘Season,’ the image of the poet is no longer that of a healthy, integrated individual, but is rather the opposite – the criminal, the sick man. Poets are no longer lighting the path that ‘everyone’ will take in the march of civilization, but are merely inventors of monstrosities, isolated orphans on the side- lines. Rather than being the ‘nightingale’ of Shelley’s ‘Defense,’ the poet (as Rimbaud writes in his famous ‘Letter of the Seer’ [’Lettre du Voyant’, to his teacher Paul Demeny, written on 15 May 1871]) is comparable to the ‘camprachico’ – the mythical mutilators of chil- dren who later displays them for money created by Victor Hugo in his 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs – or a ‘man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.’ [6] The language of Roman- ticism is acidly deformed in the poetry of Rimbaud:  17  Work of man! This is the explosion which lights up my abyss from time to time. ‘Nothing is vanity; science and onward!’ cries the modem Ecclesiastes, name- ly Everyone. And yet the bodies of the wicked and the slothful fall on the hearts of others. Ah! come quickly! out there, beyond the night… shall we miss those eternal rewards? – What can I do? I understand what Cover, graphic comic version of work is, and science moves too slowly. I see Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel ‘The Man clearly that prayer gallops and light thun- Who Laughs’. ders. This is too simple. And it is too hot. People will get along without me. I have my duty. I will be proud of it in the fashion of several others, by putting it aside. 6  Rimbaud, pg. 307. JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 7 My life is worn out. Come! let’s pretend, let’s be idle, O pity! We will exist by amusing ourselves, by dreaming of monstrous loves and fantastic universes… [7]  18 Rimbaud pens an anthem for the radical nature of Modernist indi- viduality, which involves, among other things, a courting of perver- sions, a precise but arbitrary overturning of cultural values, and a total refusal to engage in the most minute aspect of practical daily living. This is Goethe’s laconic Werther taken to a new extreme – blue jackets replaced by ‘fists in torn pockets’ (‘Ma Bohème’) – for the (male) poet does not even idolize (feminine) beauty any longer, but rather the ‘monstrous’ and ‘fantastic’ – suicide won’t be his end, but idleness. The Romantic’s belief in history as the march of democratic liberation is contaminated by the oppression that the leveling aspects of bourgeois society exerts on the artist – a com- mon theme of adolescent rebellion, here raised to the level of ethics.  19 Democracy and eternal ‘brotherhood’ may have arrived, but so has stagnation. Rimbaud writes: ‘Work seems too slight for my pride.’ [8] Rimbaud is unable to conform to history’s slowness; history simply cannot keep up with the explosive illuminations to which he felt subjected.  20 The result is that the poet, who was once permitted to warble ‘in darkness, singing to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds’ [9] (Shelley) and yet remain society’s ‘unacknowledged legislator,’ is now exiled from the mainstream of history’s march. The poet’s imagination takes on a new importance – neither God nor Neces- sity governs its machinations. The deranged imagination becomes, itself, governor, and discovers that there is freedom in disorder, and beauty in chaos. Rimbaud describes this new understanding in a section called ‘Alchemy of the Word’: 7  Rimbaud, pg. 205. 8  Rimbaud, pg. 220. 9  Shelley, pg. 480. JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 8  21  It is my turn. The story of one of my follies. For a long time I had boasted of having every possible land- scape, and found laughable the celebrated names of painting and modern poetry. I liked stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets, back-drops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmoth- ers, fairy tales, little books from childhood, old operas, ridiculous refrains, naive rhythms. I dreamed of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of republics with no history, of hushed-up religious wars, revolutions in customs, displacements of races and continents: I believed in every kind of witchcraft. [10]  22 Rimbaud overturns, in a catalogue of artistic ‘monstrosities’ – his own island of misfit toys [11] – a series of cultural assumptions regarding beauty and success; in this way, he anticipates the twenti- eth century attraction to readymades, ‘outsider art’ and kitsch. Uto- pian ideals are both embodied and destroyed; the knowableness of the scientific universe is sacrificed to the preference for ‘unrecorded voyages of discovery’ and ‘every kind of witchcraft.’ Only Blake and perhaps Yeats and Dickinson, among English-language poets, seems to have had the power to make the great substitutions – an imaginative universe in place of the ‘rational’ one – that Rimbaud describes here. (French writers, from Lautréamont, Jarry and Rous- sel to Genet, Queneau and Debord would make a tradition of it.)  23 However, it is the adolescent Rimbaud, then on the verge of terminating his writing career, who speaks of these imaginative escapades, these substitutions, in the past tense, as his ‘follies.’ He continues:  24  I invented the color of the vowels! – A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. – I regulated the form and movement of each consonant, 10  Rimbaud, pg. 193. 11  Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, a Christmas television special produced in stop motion animation by Rankin/Bass in 1964. JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 9 and, with instinctive rhythms, I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible some day to all the senses. I reserved transla- tion rights. It was at first a study. I wrote out silences and the nights. I re- corded the inexpressible. I described frenzies.  25 It is the dual nature of letters – their role as mere elements in a word, and the role they can play in the evocation of colors and meaning – that best describes the synthesis that occurs in the ‘alchemy of the word.’ Rimbaud’s synaesthetic sense permitted him to see the transformative power of even the naked vowel. What is most important, for now, is that Rimbaud sees himself as possessing the power to regulate a total artwork – a Gesamtkunstwerk for the page – one that will be ‘accessible someday to all the senses.’  26 Rimbaud conjures the phantasmagoria of history in the ‘Season In Hell.’ The most famous use of this word in poetry is in Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley – ‘He had moved amid her phantasma- goria, / Amid her galaxies’ – but this ‘phantasmagoria’ might be better compared to the state of being the ‘still center’ of the ‘turning world’ as described in Eliot’s Four Quartets, and involves a sense of divorce from, but power over, the ghostly movement of objects through time. In this Cartesian point beyond the flux of imma- nence – an imagined stasis – things become plastic and malleable, subject to a form of ‘alchemy,’ not so much in themselves – the poet doesn’t turn lead into gold – but in the way one perceives them, this latter function dissolving the necessity of the former.  27 It is best expressed by Rimbaud’s catalogue – church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers – but also in his hallucinogenic perception of a ‘virtual’ or alternative world of ‘hushed-up religious wars.’ Rimbaud finds himself able to go backwards in time, to reverse history’s motion, having discovered that one need only look the other way, and in the folds of this tur- bulence he upsets cultural values. Significantly, Rimbaud rejects the power that has been granted him by this new understanding of the JPR 01 2014 Brian Kim Stefans: The Alchemy of the World Page 10 imagination; its power is one of the many veils of illusion that he discards – in his total thrust for demystification – in ‘Season.’ The Art of Politics  28 The sentiments of Rimbaud’s poem, which recorded the ‘folly’ of one person’s experience of the historical phantasmagoria, began to be put to political purposes by Modernist artists. A major early Modernist manifesto, written by F. T. Marinetti and published in 1909 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, is one of the more extreme of these statements. He lists the aims of the Futurist program:  29  1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. 3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and slap. Tato, Flying over the Coliseum in a Spiral, 4. We say the world’s magnifi- 1930. Ventura Collection, Rome. cence has been enriched by a new Photo: Corrado De Grazia. beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot – is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. [12]  30 This type of outrageousness – not to mention the garrulous optimism – had been already both celebrated and disavowed by Rimbaud; furthermore, the element of youthful joy and personal submission, as expressed in the ‘The Drunken Boat,’ has been lost 12  F. T. Marinetti, Let’s Murder The Moonshine: Selected Writings (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991), pg. 49.