quintessentially evaluated by random lines, random pages. A poem that appears to owe its root origins to a particular book, may in fact be indebted to little more than one haphazardly encountered image. One perception leads directly to another. In the winter of 1870/1 Rimbaud was not reading to acquire knowledge; he was looking to fan the excited nebulae that had grown up in his unconscious with associations which might help to spark off poems.
Moreover, some time in the spring of 1871, on one of his audacious flights to Paris, he had been raped. Wanting to enlist in the army of the Communards, and at the same time curious about sex, he may have invited the violation by hanging around one of the Paris barracks. He may have been mistaken for a street-boy looking to sell his body. The experience gave rise to the poem ‘Le Cœur volé’, and the psychological scar inflicted by rape clearly increased the poet’s intention to avenge himself on society through writing that would carry the occult potency of ritual magic.
‘Le Cœur volé’ is explicit in terms of somatic revulsion. The poem anticipates Artaud’s obsession with turning the body inside out as the sounding-board for a pain transmitted to the poetic line. ‘Mon triste Cœur bave à la poupe,/ Mon cœur couvert de caporal:/ Ils y lancent des jets de soupe’ (‘My poor heart dribbles at the poop,/ My heart soiled with cigarette-spit:/ They spatter it with jets of soup’). And in the second stanza he describes the coarsely erect soldiers. They are ithyphallic, obscene, they jeer as he is buggered. There is no respite when you are impaled. Not even the childlike invention of the magic word ‘abracadabratic’, in relation to the waves which he hopes will wash over and purify his defiled body, can be of any assistance. He tells us that the aftermath will be stomach retchings — ‘J’aurai des sursauts stomachiques’ — for the men have clearly used him violently. He was probably booted back on the street, alone, where he was unable to find any consolation for this degrading experience amidst the anonymous lives pouring through the city. Paris was in a state of insurrection; the sodomizing of a young tramp up from the provinces would have been the subject of ridicule and not investigation. What else could a boy expect if he hung around soldiers?
Whether Rimbaud actually participated in the Commune, fighting with the insurgent army against the Versaillais, who represented the elected government, we do not know. His wild rage was being directed inwardly. To the external world he was nothing; a schoolboy turned ruffian, a subversive idler to those who recognized him in Charleville. But he was preparing a lycanthropic attack. The poetry that Rimbaud was writing at the time of his Lettres du voyant is often obscene and violently denigratory of women. Rimbaud’s mother petrified him: she was Medusa? Were they all like that? Sympathetic women had not entered into Rimbaud’s life, and one senses that throughout his youthfully vehement poetic rebellion he partly blames women for his inverted sexuality and for the vulnerability to which he is exposed. And hadn’t he been raped? Why was one given no protection? The soldiers had used him as a substitute for a girl. His sixteen-year-old world was upside-down. His method was to lash out; he would reduce sex to scatology, to canine bestiality.
In ‘L’Orgie parisienne’ written in the early summer of 1871, Rimbaud envisaged Paris as a sprawling, scabrous whore. His fury mounts attack after attack on the image of copulation.
O cœurs de saleté, bouches épouvantables,
Fonctionnez plus fort, bouches de puanteurs!
Un vin pour ces torpeurs ignobles, sur ces tables...
Vos ventres sont fondus de
Moreover, some time in the spring of 1871, on one of his audacious flights to Paris, he had been raped. Wanting to enlist in the army of the Communards, and at the same time curious about sex, he may have invited the violation by hanging around one of the Paris barracks. He may have been mistaken for a street-boy looking to sell his body. The experience gave rise to the poem ‘Le Cœur volé’, and the psychological scar inflicted by rape clearly increased the poet’s intention to avenge himself on society through writing that would carry the occult potency of ritual magic.
‘Le Cœur volé’ is explicit in terms of somatic revulsion. The poem anticipates Artaud’s obsession with turning the body inside out as the sounding-board for a pain transmitted to the poetic line. ‘Mon triste Cœur bave à la poupe,/ Mon cœur couvert de caporal:/ Ils y lancent des jets de soupe’ (‘My poor heart dribbles at the poop,/ My heart soiled with cigarette-spit:/ They spatter it with jets of soup’). And in the second stanza he describes the coarsely erect soldiers. They are ithyphallic, obscene, they jeer as he is buggered. There is no respite when you are impaled. Not even the childlike invention of the magic word ‘abracadabratic’, in relation to the waves which he hopes will wash over and purify his defiled body, can be of any assistance. He tells us that the aftermath will be stomach retchings — ‘J’aurai des sursauts stomachiques’ — for the men have clearly used him violently. He was probably booted back on the street, alone, where he was unable to find any consolation for this degrading experience amidst the anonymous lives pouring through the city. Paris was in a state of insurrection; the sodomizing of a young tramp up from the provinces would have been the subject of ridicule and not investigation. What else could a boy expect if he hung around soldiers?
Whether Rimbaud actually participated in the Commune, fighting with the insurgent army against the Versaillais, who represented the elected government, we do not know. His wild rage was being directed inwardly. To the external world he was nothing; a schoolboy turned ruffian, a subversive idler to those who recognized him in Charleville. But he was preparing a lycanthropic attack. The poetry that Rimbaud was writing at the time of his Lettres du voyant is often obscene and violently denigratory of women. Rimbaud’s mother petrified him: she was Medusa? Were they all like that? Sympathetic women had not entered into Rimbaud’s life, and one senses that throughout his youthfully vehement poetic rebellion he partly blames women for his inverted sexuality and for the vulnerability to which he is exposed. And hadn’t he been raped? Why was one given no protection? The soldiers had used him as a substitute for a girl. His sixteen-year-old world was upside-down. His method was to lash out; he would reduce sex to scatology, to canine bestiality.
In ‘L’Orgie parisienne’ written in the early summer of 1871, Rimbaud envisaged Paris as a sprawling, scabrous whore. His fury mounts attack after attack on the image of copulation.
O cœurs de saleté, bouches épouvantables,
Fonctionnez plus fort, bouches de puanteurs!
Un vin pour ces torpeurs ignobles, sur ces tables...
Vos ventres sont fondus de
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