It shines forth at the moment when, in giving the most peculiarly appropriate expression to rebellion that it has ever received, he simultaneously proclaims his triumph and his agony, his conception of a life beyond the confines of this world and the inescapability of the world, the yearning for the unattainable and reality brutally determined on restraint, the rejection of morality and the irresistible compulsion to duty.
At the moment when he carries in his breast both illumination and the darkness of hell, when he hails and insults beauty, and creates, from an insoluble conflict, the intricate counterpoint of an exquisite song, he is the poet of rebellion the greatest of all. The order in which he wrote his two great works is of no importance.
In any case there was very little time between the conception of the two books, and any artist knows, with the certainty born of experience, that Rimbaud simultaneously carried the seeds of the Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer) and the Illuminations within him. Though he wrote them one after the other, there is no doubt that he experienced the suffering of both of them at the same time. This contradiction, which killed him, was the real source of his genius.
But where, then, is the virtue of someone who refuses to face the contradiction and betrays his own genius before having drunk it to the last bitter drop? Rimbaud’s silence is not a new method of rebelling; at least, we can no longer say so after the publication of the Harrar letters. His metamorphosis is undoubtedly mysterious. But there is also a mystery attached to the banality achieved by brilliant young girls whom marriage transforms into adding or knitting machines.
The myth woven around Rimbaud supposes and affirms that nothing was possible after the Season in Hell. But what is impossible for the supremely gifted poet or for the inexhaustibly creative writer? How can we imagine anything to follow Moby Dick, The Trial, Zarathustra, The Possessed? Nevertheless, they were followed by great works, which instruct, implement, and bear witness to what is finest in the writer, and which only come to an end at his death. Who can fail to regret the work that would have been greater than the Season in Hell and of which we have been deprived by Rimbaud’s abdication?
Can Abyssinia be considered as a monastery; is it Christ who shut Rimbaud’s mouth? Such a Christ would be the kind of man who nowadays lords it over the cashier’s desk in a bank, to judge by the letters in which the unhappy poet talks only about his money which he wants to see «wisely invested» and «bringing in regular dividends.» 2 The man who exulted under torture, who hurled curses at God and at beauty, who hardened himself in the harsh atmosphere of crime, now only wants to marry someone «with a future.»
The mage, the seer, the convict who lived perpetually in the shadow of the penal colony, the man-king on a godless earth, always carried seventeen pounds of gold in a belt worn uncomfortably round his stomach, which he complained gave him dysentery. Is this the mythical hero, worshipped by so many young men who, though they do not spit in the face of the world, would die of shame at the mere idea of such a belt? To maintain the myth, those decisive letters must be ignored.
2 It is only fair to note that the tone of these letters might be explained by the people to whom they are written. But they do not suggest that Rimbaud is making a great effort to lie. Not one word betrays the Rimbaud of former times.
It is easy to see why they have been so little commented upon. They are a sacrilege, as truth sometimes is. A great and praiseworthy poet, the greatest of his time, a dazzling oracle—Rimbaud is all of these things. But he is not the man-god, the burning inspiration, the monk of poetry as he is often presented. The man only recaptured his greatness in the hospital bed in which, at the hour of his painful end, even his mediocrity becomes moving: «How unlucky I am, how very unlucky I am . . . and I’ve money on me that I can’t even keep an eye on!» The defiant cry of those last wretched moments: «No, no, now I rebel against death!» happily restores Rimbaud to that part of common human experience which involuntarily coincides with greatness.
The young Rimbaud comes to life again on the brink of the abyss and with him revives the rebellion of the times when his imprecations against life were only expressions of despair at the thought of death. It is at this point that the bourgeois trader once more rejoins the tortured adolescent whom we so much admired. He recaptures his youth in the terror and bitter pain finally experienced by those who do not know how to attain happiness. Only at this point does his passion, and with it his truth, begin.
Moreover, Harrar was actually foretold in his work, but in the form of his final abdication. «And best of all, a drunken sleep on the beach.» The fury of annihilation, appropriate to every rebel, then assumes its most common form. The apocalypse of crime—as conceived by Rimbaud in the person of the prince who insatiably slaughters his subjects and endless licentiousness are rebellious themes that will be taken up again by the surrealists.
But finally, even with Rimbaud, nihilist dejection prevailed; the struggle, the crime itself, proved too exacting for his exhausted mind. The seer who drank, if we may venture to say so, in order not to forget ended by finding in drunkenness the heavy sleep so well known to our contemporaries. One can sleep on the beach, or at Aden.
And one consents, no longer actively, but passively, to accept the order of the world, even if the order is degrading. Rimbaud’s silence is also a preparation for the silence of authority, which hovers over minds resigned to everything save to the necessity of putting up a fight.
Rimbaud’s great intellect, suddenly subordinated to money, proclaims the advent of other demands, which are at first excessive and which will later be put to use by the police. To be nothing—that is the cry of the mind exhausted by its own rebellion. This leads to the problem of suicide of the mind, which, after all, is less respectable than the surrealists’ suicide, and more fraught with consequences. Surrealism itself, coming at the end of this great act of rebellion, is only significant because it attempted to perpetuate that aspect of Rimbaud which alone evokes our sympathy.
Deriving the rules for a rebellious asceticism from the letter about the seer and the system it implies, he illustrates the struggle between the will to be and the desire for annihilation, between the yes and the no, which we have discovered again and again at every stage of rebellion. For all these reasons, rather than repeat the, endless commentaries that surround Rimbaud’s work, it seemed preferable to rediscover him and to follow him among his successors.
Absolute rebellion, total insubordination, sabotage on principle, the humor and cult of the absurd—such is the nature of surrealism, which defines itself, in its primary intent, as the incessant examination of all values. The refusal to draw any conclusions is flat, decisive, and provocative. «We are specialists in rebellion.» Surrealism, which, according to Aragon, is a machine for capsizing the mind, was first conjured up by the Dadaist movement, whose romantic origins and anemic dandyism must be noted.3 Non-signification and contradiction are therefore cultivated for their own sakes. «The real Dadaists are against Dada.
3 Jarry, one of the masters of Dadaism, is the last incarnation, peculiar rather than brilliant, of the metaphysical dandy.
Everyone is a director of Dada.» Or again: «What is good? What is ugly? What is great, strong, weak . . . ? Don’t know! Don’t know!» These parlor nihilists were obviously threatened with having to act as slaves to the strictest orthodoxies. But there is something more in surrealism than standard nonconformism, the legacy left by Rimbaud, which, in fact, Breton recapitulates as follows: «Must we abandon all hope at that particular point?»
An urgent appeal to absent life is reinforced by a total rejection of the present world, as Breton’s arrogant statement indicates: «Incapable of accepting the fate assigned to me, my highest perceptions outraged by this denial of justice, I refrain from adapting my existence to the ridiculous conditions of existence here below.» The mind, according to Breton, can find no point of rest either in this life or beyond it.
Surrealism wants to find a solution to this endless anxiety. It is «a cry of the mind which turns against itself and finally takes the desperate decision to throw off its bonds.» It protests against death and «the laughable duration» of a precarious condition. Thus surrealism places itself at the mercy of impatience.
It exists in a condition of wounded frenzy: at once inflexible and self-righteous, with the consequent implication of a moral philosophy. Surrealism, the gospel of chaos, found itself compelled, from its very inception, to create an order. But at first it only dreamed of destruction—by poetry, to begin with—on the plane of imprecation, and later by the use of actual weapons.
