Looking At Rimbaud Through The Camera Obscura A Study Of Rimbaud Le Fils1 By Pierre Michon

Nadia Sajadi-Rosen

In his first published work Vies minuscules,2 Pierre Michon briefly relates how

as a child he discovered Arthur Rimbaud in an article from an annual magazine his grandfather would buy. Michon recalls how the photograph accompanying the article (‘une mauvaise photo de fin d’enfance où Rimbaud comme toujours boude’3 (see figures 1 and 2) reminded him of some of his own classmates from remote villages, who would make the long early morning journey to school every day. ‘Je connaissais cette douceur idiote et ces tics noirs, nous étions assis sur le même banc’.4 Michon then explains how he came to identify with the boy in the picture, and adopted him as a role model:

Non, cette chair bougonne ne m’était pas plus inconnue que l’enfance ardennaise maladroite que le pigiste romançait. J’avais d’autres Ardennes par la fenêtre, et mon père, s’il n’était pas capitaine, s’était enfui comme le capitaine Frédéric Rimbaud; j’avais au moulin de Mourioux, plus enterré que ceux de la Meuse, lâché en mai des bâteaux frêles, peut-être déjà lâché ma vie [...]. D’autres points de l’article me laissèrent perplexe mais exalté dans le projet d’un jour résoudre ces énigmes, me rendre digne du modèle abrupt qui venait de m’être révélé : qu’était-ce donc que cette poésie féroce [...] pour laquelle, paraissait-il, on quittait à grand dam sa famille, le monde, soi-même à la fin, et qu’elle-même on jetait au rancart par amour d’elle, qui vous faisait pareils aux morts et superlativement vivant?5

Figure 1: Arthur Rimbaud at the Institut Rossat in 1864 (front row, third from the left).

1 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991). 2 Pierre Michon, Vies minuscules (Paris : Gallimard, 1984). 3 Ibid., 190. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 190-1.

Figure 2: Arthur Rimbaud photographed by Etienne Carjat n 1871.

On a number of levels, Rimbaud le fils, which was written on the centenary of the poet’s death, represents a continuation of this text. Whilst never pretending to resolve the enigma of Rimbaud’s poems, in this work Pierre Michon engages in a personal quest into the legendary poet’s short-lived but impassioned relationship

with poetry. One of the striking features of Rimbaud le fils is precisely the author’s daringly individual approach to Rimbaud, and his reluctance to let canonical views on the poet weigh too heavily on his private vision. In an interview, Michon explains that the work was not intended as yet another exegesis of Rimbaud’s oeuvre, but as a personal tête-à-tête with the poet: ‘je me suis efforcé de ne pas avoir une approche d’histoire littéraire [...] Je me suis efforcé au contraire d’utiliser ce qui me restait de juvénilité pour nourrir un face-à-face entre ce que j’ai été dans ma jeunesse et ce qu’a peut-être été Rimbaud’.6 Desiring an unmediated encounter with Rimbaud, the author founded his work primarily on the documents that had sprung directly from the poet, namely his oeuvre, letters and, in particular, his photographs. Indeed, the work is interspersed with precise references to photographs of Rimbaud and his entourage (most of which Michon found in Gallimard’s special edition Album Rimbaud)7 and is a fascinating example of the use of photographs as a means of accessing and writing about a distant reality.

Michon’s primary reason for resorting to photographs is to invoke their indexical nature and to access the real person behind the legendary name of Arthur Rimbaud. By choosing the following quotation from Mallarmé as an epigraph, Michon expresses his consciousness of the distance separating him from Rimbaud, and of the impossibility of ever truly knowing him:

Il y a toute une époque entre nous et, aujourd’hui un pays entier de neige

It is not only the gap of time that Michon seeks to bridge. The author also

fights his way through the innumerable studies that have buried the real Rimbaud under an impenetrable ‘pays entier de neige’. In Michon’s own words, ‘Rimbaud a beaucoup souffert des travaux qui ont été faits sur lui, qui l’ont transformé en vieillard’.8 Lastly, the impenetrable nature of Rimbaud’s own writing is yet another reason for Michon’s resort to photography. The author’s striking depiction of Rimbaud’s work as a clenched fist which is ultimately severed, ‘une œuvre petite et fermée comme un poing, serrée comme un poing sur un sens réservé, une œuvre née d’une vie déchirante comme un poing d’homme qu’on a coupé’,9 is a powerful evocation of the intensity and hermetic quality of the poet’s oeuvre, and of his ultimate estrangement from his poetry. Indeed, a considerable part of Michon’s book on Rimbaud is devoted to the impossibility and to the pointlessness of trying to decipher the true kernel of meaning in his poems. Rather than elucidating his life and

6 Anne-Sophie Perlat and Franz Johansson, ‘Entretien’, Scherzo, 5 (1998), 7. 7 H. Matarasso and P. Petitfils (ed.), Album Rimbaud (Gallimard: Paris, 1967). 8 Anne-Sophie Perlat and Franz Johansson, ‘Entretien’, Scherzo, 5 (1998), 7. 9 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Gallimard: Paris, 1991), 104.

work, studies on the poet seem doomed to miss the mark and to amount to no more than personal variations on the legend of Rimbaud:

C’est un poème que nous écrivons, chacun à notre manière [...] C’est notre poème, et les poèmes de Rimbaud restent cachés à l’intérieur du nôtre, bien au secret, réservés, postulés : notre poème a pris tant de place qu’il nous arrive, ouvrant le petit livre où reposent les écrits d’Arthur Rimbaud, de nous étonner qu’ils existent.10

As opposed to the innumerable exegeses on Rimbaud, which only seem to

draw Michon further away from his subject, the photographs of the poet, reflecting the light emanating from his body long ago, remain inexorably attached to the physical reality of what was Arthur Rimbaud. Indeed, Michon experiences photographs as veritable relics allowing him to gaze into the past and to come as close as possible to bridging the gap between himself and the poet. Michon’s devotional response to Rimbaud’s pictures also testifies to the photograph's reliquary status. Echoing André Bazin who, in his essay ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ evokes the reliquary facet of photography and compares the photograph to the Holy Shroud,11 Michon writes in thoroughly religious terms when he refers to Rimbaud’s most famous photograph, taken in 1871 by the poet and photographer Etienne Carjat (see figure 3). Whereas the picture is referred to alternatively as ‘l’ovale angélique’,12 ‘cette mandorle plus connue maintenant en ce monde que le voile de sainte Véronique’,13 and ‘cette très haute icône’,14 the event of Carjat photographing Rimbaud is depicted as a veritable transfiguration. Indeed, the religious dimension of photography also extends to Michon’s vision of the ambition that fired Rimbaud and the other poets of his generation. Quite remarkably, the author depicts the ‘Académie d’absinthe’ as an obscure community of fatherless young poets with great expectations, each waiting to be singled out and sanctified by a divine figure: ‘Et chacun de ces fils boudeurs attendait qu’un père vienne ratifier sa bouderie à lui, le tirer du lot, l’élever à sa droite sur un trône invisible’.15 Underlying this depiction is Michon’s vision of a genealogy of literature, whereby each great writer hands down the flame, so to speak, of poetry to a poet of the following generation. The long line of great writers is thus viewed as an umbilical cord reaching back through time to such magnificent names as Virgil and Homer, and ultimately to a divine source, ‘le

10 Ibid., 74. 11 André Bazin, ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ (1945) in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1981), 14. 12 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 91. 13 Ibid., 100. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 82.

Nom ineffable’.16 However, Michon explains that in Rimbaud’s times, the last of the great poets, such as Baudelaire and Hugo, were either dead or absent, putting an end to the principle of election that had until then directed the renewal of poetry.

Baudelaire était mort, le Vieux en conversation avec Shakespeare seulement dans les quatre pieds de sa table, il n’y avait plus de roi dans Saint-Cyr pour trancher là-dedans en dernier ressort, le principe d’élection était perdu. Le sacre que demandait Rimbaud avec tant de force, que tous les fils demandaient sans doute quoique avec moins de force, le sacre n’était plus du ressort de personne. 17

Figure 3: Rimbaud photographed by Etienne Carjat in 1872.

Abandoned by their fathers, the poets in Rimbaud le fils turn to the occult science of photography as a short cut to enduring fame: ‘de sous la cagoule noire la 16 Ibid., 20. 17 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 82.

postérité accourait; et sur le tabouret des photographes ils tremblaient devant la postérité’.18 Indeed, throughout the work, photography is depicted as a kind of sorcery enabling one to be consecrated by a blessing of a different kind, ‘la grâce des halogénures d’argent’19. Whilst the camera obscura is denoted as a ‘boîte à malice’,20 and the repeated mention of ‘sels d’argent’ creates an allusion to alchemy, the photographer operating the camera ‘de sous la cagoule noire’ is likened to a sorcerer engaged in the occult practice of tampering with time (‘bricoler de l’avenir avec du passer, trafiquer du temps’).21 In the penultimate chapter of Rimbaud le fils, which constitutes the climax of the work, the depiction of the fatherless poets awaiting their sanctification, and the invocation of the occult facet of photography, all culminate in the scene of Rimbaud’s transfiguration, where, quite unknowingly, Carjat assumes the predestined role of an agent of Time catalysing the young man’s consecration as the ‘chosen one’. Michon begins his inspired reconstruction of the event by describing the young poets walking up a hill to Carjat’s home studio. Whilst the hill ‘semble vous mener vers le ciel’,22 the unusually well-groomed young men appear like the candidates for a special nomination: ‘ils sont quatre ou cinq à monter la pente. [...] Habits noirs, chapeaux, apparences nettes, tout cela résolu en éclats noirs sous le soleil; car ce jour-là ils sont fringués’.23 Everything, from the platform and the stool in the photographer’s studio, to the golden reflections of the brass camera and the resplendence of the autumn leaves outside, suggests a coronation. The light of day, so crucial to the photographic process, appears as the fulgurating power of a divine and fatherly sky:

Octobre tombe par la verrière, la lumière est forte et bleue. Bien sûr le vent s’est levé dehors, le ciel est encore plus grand. Il y a des plantes hautes dans des pots, la lumière elle aussi les avive et les brûle moins vite qu’elle ne fait les sels d’argent, mais avec la même passion. Et ce canon sur sa hausse, qu’un cylindre coiffe exactement : de grands morceaux de cuivre jaune et de bakélite noir qui s’emboîtent et luisent. Puis l’estrade, le tabouret, le drap morne derrière. Rimbaud s’assied où Baudelaire s’est assis. [...] Le ciel par-dessus s’emplit de cuivres. Les feuilles d’or glissent sur la vitre glacée. [...] Le ciel par-dessus est grand comme un père. Il y a longtemps que Rimbaud ne respire plus. Carjat déclenche. La lumière se rue sur les halogénures, les brûle.24

18 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 83. 19 Ibid., 85. 20 Ibid., 27. 21 Ibid., 15. 22 Ibid., 83. 23 Ibid., 84. 24 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 90-1.

Michon is particularly fascinated by Carjat’s role in the making of the legend, and remarks how his portrait of Rimbaud accompanied the poet into the future and resounded with almost as much power as his works: ‘Nous avons vu Carjat dans cet instant vertigineux où dans le plateau de la balance il jetait le portrait ovale qui pèse autant que l’œuvre entière, ou peu s’en faut’.25 One must not forget, however, that the author’s interest in Carjat is symptomatic of a general fascination with secondary figures in the lives of the people he writes about. In Vie de Joseph Roulin written three years earlier,26 Michon wrote about Vincent Van Gogh through the eyes of an obscure postman whom the famous painter befriended and painted on a number of occasions. In the same way as Roulin became famous as a subject of Van Gogh’s paintings, Carjat, himself a poet, would not have been remembered if not for his photographs of celebrated poets and artists such as Baudelaire, Courbet and Rimbaud, among others. However, more significantly than the parallels that might be drawn between Roulin and Carjat, is the way Michon uses them as an oblique means of reaching out to his distant subjects. Whilst the author’s contemplation of Van Gogh’s paintings of Roulin are an attempt to break into the physical remnants of a moment during which they were locked into each other’s gaze, Michon’s rêverie over Rimbaud’s photograph leads him to imagine what it must have been like to be on the other side of the lens, and how the poet might have appeared to Carjat.

Apart from treating the photograph as a relic and a religious icon, and resorting to the figure of Carjat as an oblique lens leading to Rimbaud, another remarkable aspect of Michon’s use of photographs is the force with which the photographic is allowed to permeate the author’s vision of the poet. As Danièle Méaux observes, ‘les traces photochimiques semblent avoir fécondé l’écriture et habitent, par leur nature même, la manière dont Pierre Michon revisite la légende. [...] l’accent est mis de façon insistante sur la technique de la prise de vue’.27 However, the author not only resorts to photography’s technical terms, but also uses the language of photography as a source of metaphor. In Rimbaud le fils, the camera obscura assumes a metaphoric dimension, and represents the centre of gravity around which Michon’s vision of Rimbaud revolves. Indeed, the poet’s innermost being, or the unconscious part of his psyche absorbing the different influences in his life, is described alternatively as a ‘cagibi obscur’ and a ‘cagibi intérieur’, suggesting both a ‘for intérieur’ and a camera obscura. In Michon’s private vision of Rimbaud, beginning with the poet’s parents, and moving on to teachers and contemporary poets, almost all the people who had an influence on him were thrown, as it were,

25 Ibid., 101. 26 Pierre Michon, Vie de Joseph Roulin (Lagrasse : Verdier, 1988). 27 Danièle Méaux, ‘Une légende inscrite sur sels d’argent (à propos de Rimbaud le fils)’, Pierre Michon, l’écriture absolue, ed. by Agnès Castiglione (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2002), 82.

into this secret chamber. It is in the following passage, evoking the tremendous influence that Rimbaud’s mother had on the poet, that Michon first introduces the idea of the poet’s psychological ‘dark room’. As the narrative progresses, other characters join Rimbaud’s parents in his ‘cagibi obscur’.

‘[...] la mère disparut du nombre des créatures visibles et se réfugia tout à fait dans le fils, tenant ses vieilles jupes à deux mains bondit sans reste à l’intérieur du fils, dans ce cagibi obscur et jamais ouvert en nous-même où, nous-dit-on, nous n’avons pas conscience de nos actes et agissons; elle y rejoignit le Capitaine qui y était, lui, depuis un bout de temps, avec son sabre et son shako ; mais elle y fit plus de bruit que le Capitaine.’28

There is deliberate violence in Michon’s description of the way these different

influences fuse together in the mind of Rimbaud: indeed, Rimbaud’s ‘cagibi obscur’ is depicted not just a melting pot but also an instrument of force used to eliminate unwanted influences and contenders of poetic excellence. For example, the poet Izambard, who had taught the boy at school and encouraged him in his writing, is ‘evacuated’ and forced into the recesses of his mind as an inadequate literary model: ‘Rimbaud [...] le moqua et l’évacua à son tour, bazarda aux puces les bouquins de son bon maître et le mit au cagibi’.29 As for Verlaine, the famous poet with whom the boy had a stormy love affair, whilst their relationship is suggestively described as a dance taking place behind the closed blinds of a dark room, he too is eventually eliminated: ‘Dans le cagibi intérieur, Verlaine est sagement allongé à côté d’Izambard. Et la bourrée en ce qui les concerne est terminée’.30

The camera obscura used to describe Rimbaud’s innermost being is also suggestive of an unfathomable depth. Indeed, in his personal elaboration on Rimbaud, Michon resorts very often to the image of a bottomless well, especially when referring to the dominant influence that Rimbaud’s mother had on his poetry. Whilst his mother Vitalie Cuif, locked inside the recesses of her child’s mind, is depicted as ‘une paysanne noire qui creuse un trou où la langue démesurément s’engouffre et vibre’, Rimbaud is described as a ‘puisatier’ of a higher order, ‘plus fort qu’elle, qui creusait plus profondément et plus irrémédiablement’.31 As for his poetry, it is described in the equally vertiginous terms of ‘un puits d’encre à pic au fond de quoi page après page on choit’.32 The image of the abyss within Rimbaud is also an efficient means of expressing, as mentioned earlier, the violence with which Rimbaud attempted to throw down the various people standing in his light, ‘les

28 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 31. 29 Ibid., 32. 30 Ibid., 68. 31 Ibid., 29. 32 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 17.

descendre l’un après l’autre, creuser sans merci sous eux le puits où les engouffrer’.33 Lastly, there is little doubt that the dangerous depth of Rimbaud’s ‘cagibi obscur’ is also an allusion to the barrel of a gun, and to Rimbaud’s future involvement with arms running. Most skilfully, in the following passage referring to the famous incident during which Verlaine shot and wounded Rimbaud in the wrist, Michon summons up the warlike dimension of photography. Gazing at a photograph of Rimbaud in order to re-enact Verlaine’s part in the incident, the author describes how the young poet fires back with his mighty gaze:

Verlaine [...] revint avec un six-coups pour descendre la langue personnellement, en être le maître, tira deux fois sur la langue qui le regardait avec des yeux d’enfant, boudeurs, clairs, souverains, tout en sachant avant même de presser la gâchette que la langue on ne la descend pas, on ne lui fait pas la peau, ça ricoche et revient sur vous. Et sur ce ricochet il se coucha, un chapelet aux mains.34

This reconstruction of Verlaine’s fired attack on Rimbaud shares certain

similarities with the scene mentioned earlier during which Carjat photographs the poet. In both cases, an instrument is targeting the poet, and whilst one is a firearm, the other uses light as its prime ingredient. However, over and above the camera’s resemblance to a gun, in both instances what transpires is the author’s attempt, whilst gazing at a photograph of Rimbaud, to explore precise moments in the poet’s life through the eyes of the people he knew. Precisely in the same way as his contemplation of Rimbaud’s ‘portrait ovale’ leads him to imagine what Carjat might have thought whilst gazing at Rimbaud through his lens, in the explosive scene with Verlaine, it is by gazing at a photograph where ‘Rimbaud comme toujours boude’ that Michon tries to imagine what the older poet must have felt, standing behind his gun.35 Both scenes constitute an attempt to stage a ‘face-à-face’ with Rimbaud and to explore how ‘un vivant pouvait réagir à l’existence de ce vivant-ci, qui était, ou avait été par ailleurs la poésie personnellement’.36

In Rimbaud le fils, the only influential character who escapes Rimbaud’s ‘cagibi obscur’ is the poet Théodore de Banville. In Michon’s account of Rimbaud’s literary genealogy, Banville was the first to recognise the young man’s gift as a poet, and in so doing, to welcome him amongst the ranks of poets. Although he is not thrown down, he is nevertheless depicted rather pitifully, though affectionately, as a second rate poet dwarfed by the genius of Rimbaud. Banville, whom the author nicknames ‘Gilles’, given his apparent resemblance to the character of Gilles in Watteau’s

33 Ibid., 27. 34 Ibid., 72. 35 Pierre Michon, Vies minuscules, (Paris : Gallimard, 1984) 190. 36 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 101-2.

paintings, becomes a collective name for all the minor writers, including Michon himself, who have ever foolishly attempted to approach the ungraspable poetic genius of Rimbaud, not realising the curse awaiting them: ‘une sombre fée qui se tient dans ce petit mélange d’œuvre et de vie qu’on appelle Rimbaud, et qui transforme ceux qui l’approchent en Banville, en Pierrot’ (see figure 4). 37

37 Ibid., 51.

Figure 4: ‘Gilles’ (or Pierrot) by Antoine Watteau, 1718.

Whilst Banville does not end up in Rimbaud’s ‘cagibi obscur’, the allusion to the camera obscura is nevertheless sustained in the description of the hapless crowd of Gilles endlessly and stupidly replaying the legend of Rimbaud in the dark room of their minds: ‘Dans sa chambre noire en plein midi il fait tourner inlassablement cette bobine ; cette danse ; cette chute ; et il en reste baba comme au premier jour, lui qui est cloué là avec ses mains pendantes, ses pieds de Caliban’.38

In the final chapter of Rimbaud le fils, it becomes more than ever evident that within the figure of the innumerable Gilles, baffled by his poetry and unable to write about Rimbaud without missing the mark, lies a self-portrait of the author. Indeed, Michon’s attempt to discover the meaning of Rimbaud’s poetry by gazing at ‘les très simples portraits d’hommes qui vécurent’ ends in a failure.39 Rather than drawing him closer to the poet, the photographs send him on a tangent: firstly, by allowing their reliquary nature to cast a religious light on the poet, thus reinforcing the legend 38 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 54. 39 Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 98-9.

rather than revealing his true identity; and secondly, by vitiating his revisitation of the legend with metaphors springing from the separate realm of photography. Whilst the reader may find the result of Michon’s re-elaboration extraordinarily inspired and original, it self-avowedly fails to rise above the innumerable variations on Rimbaud’s legend and to enable an unmediated encounter with the poet. Ultimately, a heart of absence inhabits the photographs, condemning those approaching Rimbaud to remain forever a ‘Gilles’ interminably engaged in the doubtful interpretation of his enigmatic poetry. Indeed, Michon’s narrative ends with an extensive list of questions that the author asks himself on the meaning of Rimbaud’s Saison en enfer, followed by a personal interpretation on how the poet might have addressed it to his parents. This almost seems to lead back to the very beginning of the work, where the author depicted his vision of Rimbaud’s mother Vitalie Cuif, thus evoking the circular and inconclusive nature of the author’s quest. Finally, the concluding lines of Rimbaud le fils point definitively to Rimbaud’s insurmountable absence: ‘Rimbaud dans le grenier parmi des feuillets s’est tourné contre le mur et dort comme un plomb’.40

40 Ibid., 110.