I will not write those chapters.
I will abandon those men.
You, young man of Douai or of Confolens, you have seen those men; you know them better than I do: getting off your motorbike in front of the library, removing your Walkman, entering the cool vaulted archways and proudly planting yourself in the arid hall where the referents sleep, you have asked the orderly on duty in the gray smock, the assis, for the little canonical iconography; looking down on him scornfully, rearranging your little lock of hair over your brow, and then perhaps feeling across your shoulders the motorcycle jacket ripping from the pressure of wings, you have asked not for the works of Banville, Nouveau, and Verlaine, but: the Pléiade edition of Rimbaud. Because you thought, reasonably enough, that you would find there, in the simple portraits of men who lived, the meaning that in the Illuminations whirls round and then disappears.
You have seen these men; you have interrogated their portraits in the little canonical iconography; and sheet after sheet those gazes that rested on poetry in person have leapt from the page toward you. Page after page under those impenetrable stares you have asked yourself what a witness is. You have meditated upon the vanity of the portraits assembled there, and nonetheless devotedly you have interrogated them. And those who do not appear on the page, the Abyssinian porters, the Abyssinian minion, the Brabant printer, you have seen in your mind’s eye sharing some object with Arthur Rimbaud. Leaning over your shoulder in the Confolens library, I have looked at them through your eyes: if they were printers, I have seen them make the Saison into the small magic folio that is more satisfying than bread, and more disappointing; if they were poets, I have seen them in my mind copying out whichever Illumination had just been written, not being satisfied with it, and recopying that small whirlwind into which all language flees with the meaning that disappears, I have seen them gaping as Vitalie Cuif gaped in Charleville before the Virgilian spreads: in London we have seen Germain Nouveau look up in the middle of an Illumination, displaying the proud profile, the poet’s beard, the melancholy gaze turned toward the meaning that disappears. If they were merchants, I have seen them with Rinbo the merchant laying out antelope hides full of meaning; if they were kings or grand dukes, I have seen them bargaining with him over cases of rifles, lead heavy with meaning. If they were painters, you have seen their hands produce the painting called Le Coin de table; you have seen them bringing off that fabulous group portrait in which all of them, the six poets who fell into the abyss, Bonnier, Blémont, Aicard, Valade, d’Hervilly, Pelletan, and the two poets who shine among the stars, Verlaine and Rimbaud, are seated on the same chairs, breathe the same air, have drunk the same wine, have the same gaze variously cast there toward the blue line of posthumous glory; right below the handsome Elzéar Bonnier under his black miter, mitered by his hair only as in 1830, you have seen Rimbaud to whom in the end the miter returned, the nimbus of History; and this enigmatic Last Supper in which, unusual for such a painting, the Son among the sons is not in the center of the sons, opening his hands toward the sons, but toward one side and even turning his back a bit on the others, this Last Supper of modern times has filled you with wonder and a little anxiety. Thus if they were painters they felt that and showed it, by chance perhaps, but, one would like to think, miraculously. And if they practiced the obscure art of nitrates moved by light under the black hood, I have seen them a hundred times, and I want to see them one more time make that portrait I mentioned, that mandorla better known now in this world than the veil of Saint Veronica, more full of sense, more empty, that most high icon in which the tie is eternally crooked, the tie whose color remains eternally unknown. I have seen Carjat, and perhaps we have all seen him, pensive, gazing at that crooked tie, hesitating to straighten it before taking the photo. We have seen Carjat at that vertiginous moment when he tossed onto the scale the oval portrait that weighs as much as his entire work, or just about. And Sotiro too, the little Greek employee who practiced the art of the nitrates very incidentally when his boss Rimbaud had told him before striking his pose how the black hood was to be put on, through which hole to look, which bulb to squeeze, which blade to release, little Sotiro who resembled Tartarin and conversed with language in person in a very relative French, we have seen him in the banana fields fixing once and for all, standing and too far away, the incalculable figure of Rimbaud the boss; and beyond Sotiro bustling about the hooded camera brought at great cost from Lyon, lugged for so little across the deserts, we have seen the old Rimbaud gazing into the eyes of an old woman in Charleville for whom he intended the photo. These men saw him; these men conversed with Rimbaud; and whether between them it was a question of meters or rifles, I have seen them all go speechless, laugh unpleasantly, and then justify themselves, or pound the table harder — if they were kings or grand dukes, that is — when Rimbaud’s fist hit the table. But I will not speak of them any longer.
For I think I have stated the only three ways a living being could react to the existence of this living being, who was or had otherwise been poetry in person — this living willful being, locked into his hatreds and all doors open wide to the infinite freedom of objectless loves, in whom the love and hate he had embraced had nevertheless found in the Word an object so perfect that the man, without ceasing to walk, to desire, and to curse, practically ceased to exist when the Word collapsed; I think I have said everything about the human courses of action that were permitted before him, if one wished to remain human: being incommensurably outdone with a single blow, pretending not to be and proclaiming aloud not to be, but looking away and giving up, as Izambard gave up; interminably answering him, commenting, that is to say negotiating, knowing all the while, however, that the deal is rigged, with each weighing the king who is in the poem throws his gold sword onto the scale, you have to start over, accumulate on your side years of wretched paperwork, and still the scale’s beam does not move a hair: that was Banville’s way, or rather the way of that multiple man whom I called Banville for the sake of convenience. And finally, to do him in, once and for all to oppose lead to the Word, as Verlaine attempted. And if there were other human postures, they have escaped me — although blind obedience has not escaped me, doglike admiration of a small being for a great being, which was good Sotiro’s way; but that does not interest me here, because obedience is not a quality of a man of letters, I mean that it has no dealings with the eternal relaunching of literature.
Nevertheless, I would like to leave Arthur Rimbaud there in the company of Sotiro among the banana trees. There could be worse fraternities: good Sotiro trots along with the tripod camera on his shoulder, his short legs make it hard for him to keep up with his boss’s mythological strides. Beside the palm gardens the boss disappears, there his perfect rhythms disappear, his repudiated rhythms, his delenda est and his taste for the word merde. And perhaps that is the word he cries once more from under the shadows where he has disappeared, but as if it were a joke, a caress, for the benefit of the good Sotiro. And there: behind Sotiro, in turn, the palms close, perhaps they rest under the banana trees, the boss sleeps, once more he tries in vain to sleep off the drunkenness of his adolescence, the servant watches him sleep. No one sees them. What calm. No bugle here, under this shade; but already in Paris the bugles are sounding, a new flag is hoisted with the name of Rimbaud on it, and no longer those of Hugo, Baudelaire, old-fashioned names — everything is ready for the work of the dark fairy: the loving prose of the appalling Verlaine, the abracadabras of the poets Darzens, Baju, Ghil, Montesquiou, Berrichon, Gourmont, part seers, part Limousin schoolboys, and soon Claudel shut away in Notre Dame, Breton fulminating his harebrained hierarchies, soon the benevolent tamperings of the poor appalling Isabelle. Already everyone in Paris recognizes himself in the little oval portrait as if it were a mirror: everything is ready for the hermeneutic tourniquet, the interpretation mill spinning around a work as small and closed as a fist, clenched like a fist over a meaning it guards, a work born of a life torn apart, cut off like a human fist. He is sleeping in banana fields. It seems that he is keeping quiet. Around that silence, the free-for-all has begun. And, since I have to add my two cents to that free-for-all, since I must have my opinion on the matter, I will add that I think that if he kept quiet, if he amputated himself alive from poetry as we have so obediently repeated since Mallarmé, it was because the word was not that universal pass that the young Rimbaud of Charleville had so ardently imagined — and he realized a little too late that gold alone had some chance of being that pass (I wish with all my heart, Arthur Rimbaud, that you really, physically, wore against your skin that magic belt of gold that some people attribute to you, and that in the desert it granted you all rights).