1
In the month of May, 1877, the American consul in Bremen received the following letter:
The undersigned – Born in Charleville (France) – Aged 23 – 5ft 6 height – Good healthy – Late a teacher of sciences and languages – recently deserted from the 47th Regiment of the French army – actually in Bremen without any means, the French consul refusing any Relief. Would like to know on which conditions he could conclude an immedi-ate engagement in the American navy. Speaks and writes English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Has been four months a sailor in a Scotch bark, from Java to Queenstown, from August to December 76.Would be very honoured and grateful to receive an answer.
The ‘undersigned’ in question was Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet who had deserted from France, from the literary scene, recently from the Dutch army to which he’d joined up in order to get to the East Indies, who was ready to join up with any outfit that would stake him to grub and get him to somewhere around the world, an outf i t that he would promptly desert with his eye on somewhere else.
Rimbaud’s life-line is marked by breaks, his mind-line too. All in all, he marks a break in Western culture, out for something he never found and was never able to define. Anyone interested in thought, in poetics, in anything that can be called deep culture, whether West or East, North or South, can usefully take his existence and work as a point of departure.
This was the case with the Breton poet and writer, Victor Segalen, born in Brest, who, after studying to be a naval doctor in Bordeaux, himself travelled the world, mainly in Polynesia and China, but often passing by or stopping over in the territory Rimbaud fi nally ended up in: Aden, Djibouti, the Somali coast, the desert of Abyssinia.
If ever a figure haunted Segalen, and that for years on end, it was Rimbaud. Passing through Aden, in May 1909, on his way to China, Segalen notes in his diary: ‘At Aden a painful ghost with an ambiguous message rose up before me: Arthur Rimbaud’, and at that same period he writes to his wife: ‘The image of Rimbaud turns up again and again on my path.’ Rimbaud was a riddle to him, on several levels: psychological, poetic, intellectual, and in his mind question followed question concerning his enigmatic predecessor. The most complete formula of all this questioning is probably to be found in his journal, under the date January 10th 1905, when he was passing through Djibouti: ‘On the basis of the handful of documents available, I’ve been trying to make out the exact nature of the explorer in Rimbaud. The poet we know, others have gone into that. Might it be possible to reconcile those so very distant aspects of the one being? Or might it rather be that we’re in presence of a paradox, and that those two aspects are parts of a higher unity we have as yet no conception of?’
There we have the point of departure and the leitmotiv of the present essay. While endeavouring, in Segalen’s company, to answer subsidiary questions (why did Rimbaud, apparently, stop writing?
why did he change so suddenly and so brutally the course of his life?), its principal aim will be to draw at least the outlines of that hitherto unconceived ‘paradoxical unity’.
2
Where Segalen tried for the first time in a consequential way to analyse ‘the case of Rimbaud’ was in an essay begun at Djibouti in the form of scattered notes, written up at Toulon and at Brest, and finally published in Paris, in a number (15 April 1906) of the Mercure de France, under the title Le Double Rimbaud.
This essay comprises a biographical sketch, a critical and exploratory reading of Rimbaud’s work, and the approach to a theory.
Segalen starts of f with a presentation of Rimbaud‘s extraordinarily precocious and poetically explosive beginnings: the texts of Poems, The Illuminations, A Season in Hell. Thereafter, he attempts to trace Rimbaud’s movements in space. Rimbaud had always been exceptionally mobile – moving incessantly from Charleville to Brussels across the Ardennes, and from Charleville to Paris. But as from the age of nineteen, the movement spreads and speeds up. We fi nd him in England, in Belgium, in Germany, Austria, Holland, Java, Cyprus. ‘He wandered about in a way no one else ever did’, comments Segalen. ‘He was always on the move.’ And he quotes one of Rimbaud’s letters: ‘I’d like to travel the whole world over.’ Segalen interprets this extreme mobility in several ways. In the first place, mere fortune-hunting. Then, the desire to live through as much experience as possible. And finally, sheer wanderlust. A clinical approach to such wanderlust (remember, Segalen was also a doctor) would catalogue it as ‘ambulatory mania’, or ‘dromomania’, a diagnostic which Segalen sets aside as being intellectually facile and existentially lazy, contributing in no way to a solution to the radical problem posed: ‘Rimbaud’s double life, with, on the one hand, productive artistic fertility, and, on the other, the most arid of arid nomadisms’.
Especially as the ‘dromomania’ seems to calm down when Rimbaud settles in Abyssinia, where the excited movement turns into the harassed displacement of a commercial traveller, where all the existential turbulence runs down into grinding business.
That’s how Segalen saw the context and the problem. I’d suggest, though, that both context and problem were even more drastic.
3
When, in Djibouti, Segalen started asking around about Rimbaud’s life in Abyssinia, questioning one eye-witness after the other, he got very strange answers. The Rhigas brothers (Athanase at the Café de la Paix, Constantin at the Café de France), who had known Rimbaud well, had this to say: ‘He was a tall, lean fellow, with no fat to him at all, and could he walk! [. . .] Never seen anyone like him for walking! Away he’d go, his coat flapping open, a little fez on his head, and walk, walk, walk.’ According to the same witnesses, Rimbaud, there in the Harrar desert, was ‘very sober, never touched a drop of liquor, drank only coffee, Turkish style’. All this sounds like a kind of asceticism – unless of course it was only to save money that Rimbaud drank no wine (I don’t really think, as some have suggested, it was because he had something better than wine, that is, haschisch). When Segalen asks those veteran merchants how good a businessman Rimbaud was, he’s told this: ‘He was good at figures, but business didn’t really interest him . . . His mind was elsewhere and he was thinking bigger thoughts . . . He lived close to the bone, worked hard, never let up, but the mere amassing of a fortune would never have satisfied him.’ Segalen then wonders if Rimbaud was maybe interested in ethnology, and asks what his relationship was with the natives. Back comes the answer: ‘He didn’t hang around them . . . He had an Abyssinian woman with him for a while, but it didn’t last long . . . He had nothing much in common with anybody.’ The ethnological angle also out, Segalen now asks how Rimbaud felt about literature in general and poetry in particular – had anybody ever seen him writing? Again, he gets a straight answer: ‘Oh, yes, and fine things too . . . reports to the Society of Geography, and a book on Abyssinia.’ While gathering in further bits of information about Rimbaud (‘He could speak English, German, Spanish, Arabic and Galla . . . and what a talker, an amazing talker, all of a sudden with some remark he’d make you laugh your head off !’), Segalen focuses more and more on those ‘writings’ he’d heard about.
Back in France, he gets in touch with members of Rimbaud’s family: his sister, Isabelle, and her husband, Paterne Berrichon, the author of the first Rimbaud biogaphy, whom Segalen considers intellectually hardly adequate to the task. Examining himself Rimbaud’s letters from Abyssinia, he finds them disappointing. If it isn’t requests for technical books (on forestry and agriculture) and instruments (barometer, sextant, telescope, theodolite), it’s a perpetual string of complaints and laments: ‘I just hope we’ll be able to enjoy a few years of real rest in this life, fortunately the only life there is, which is obvious enough, because no life could be imagined more full of boredom than this one’; ‘To enjoy some rest, you have to have some capital, to get married, you have to have some capital, and capital I have none. Which means I’m condemned to trekking about in search of a living, wearing myself out to scrape together the wherewithal to buy myself a little peace.’ Running through this correspondence, Segalen learns that at one point Rimbaud had approached the newspaper Le Temps with the idea of writing a series of articles on the Italo-Ethiopian War. The editor had written back to tell Rimbaud how devoted a group of writers in Paris were to him, considering him as a legendary figure. He added that he himself, the editor of a popular newspaper, and one of his friends, ‘a successful novelist’, often spoke about him. Rimbaud hadn’t replied. He maybe needed cash, but apparently couldn’t bring himself to doing journalism in order to get his hands on some. As to being the cynosure of some little literary circle made up of ‘popular newspaper editors’ and ‘successful novelists’, how could that interest him? The space Rimbaud’s mind evolved in was radically, totally different.
Paying scant attention to certain aspects of Rimbaud’s Abyssinian existence which, on my reading, give at least some indications of that other space, Segalen concludes his initial investigation into Rimbaud’s itinerary by stating rather peremptorily that Rimbaud was neither a topnotch trader (‘he talked several languages, was diligent, had an eye to the main chance, and yet always remained a subaltern’), nor a meticulous explorer – and could he even be defined as a poet in any accustomed sense of the word? The personality that combined the author of Les Illuminations and ‘the Harrar gun-runner’ remained an enigma.
4
Sweeping away in a few quick sentences vaguely religious, culturally wornout, banal literary themes such as ‘devil and angel’, Segalen gets down to experimental psychology: ‘It will be worthwhile to spend some time on the data experimental psychology has piled up concerning double personality, and on the theories arising from those data.’ Among the theoreticians, his preference goes to Pierre Janet, the author of L’automatisme psychique, who had studied many cases of personality alternance and the superposition of variant states of conscience. But if these studies interest Segalen, he quickly comes to the conclusion that they simply do not apply to Rimbaud: none of those psychological cases had the coherence, the stamina, the will-power and life-force evident in the existence of this man.
In short, Rimbaud’s ‘case’ is not pathological, is not the result of some psychic disturbance. It cannot be fitted into a clinical frame-work, it cannot be pinned down to complications in ‘personality’.
At this point in his examination, Segalen turns to the work of Jules de Gaultier: books such as De Kant à Nietzsche or Le Bovarysme. Gaultier’s studies are neither strictly psychological, nor strictly philosophical, nor strictly literary. They move tentatively along the fron-tiers of philosophy, life-economy and poetics.
The name of Jules de Gaultier is hardly one of those that turn up habitually in discussions of twentieth-century philosophy, but since he aroused the interest of minds like Rémy de Gourmont and Victor Segalen, he no doubt deserves more attention than many a ‘philosopher’ more heavily quoted on the ideological stock exchange. Rémy de Gourmont refers to him (‘New dissociations of ideas’, Le Chemin de Velours, 1902) in the following terms: ‘M. Jules de Gaultier has worked out a new kind of manicheism which, used with care, may prove a useful tool in the handling of certain problems. He talks of a life instinct and an intellectual instinct. Not that one is good and the other bad. They both have a part to play in the work of civilization.
For if one of those principles develops the intellect at the expense of the forces that preserve the functions of life, at the same time it enables the intelligence to better enjoy life.’ As for Segalen, he considered Jules de Gaultier as his philosophical mentor. In a letter to Gaultier written at Brest, dated April 20th 1906, he says that he has long been ‘a fervent admirer’ of the ‘fertile work’ of this thinker. In another letter to Gaultier, dated December 28th 1908, he goes on to say this:
‘If I take a close look into my own thought, I see that I’ve been able to accept as masters only the Hindus and yourself.’ And in yet another (28 July 1914), when Segalen was already well out on his own way, we have this: ‘There will be hours – precious for me – when we’ll be able to bring together all kinds of elements. On your side, it will be the fruits of a masterly philosophy, of which I remain more than ever a disciple. For my part, it will be the rough elements of reality – rough elements, but still homages to thought and imaginative power.’ In that last fragment, Segalen was being over-modest. In his later work, conceived on the way to Tibet, for example, there was going to be a conjunction between sharp intellectuality (sharper than anything to be found in Jules de Gaultier) and brute reality that was powerful in the extreme.
But let’s keep to the progression.
Rimbaud’s movement was meteoric, Segalen’s was more measured – but with breaks.When he finds himself face to face on the spot with the enigmatic figure of Rimbaud, wondering which is the ‘true Rimbaud’ (the ‘real’ Rimbaud, the ‘essential’ Rimbaud), the visionary poet or the merchant-explorer, he thinks he has a clue, a key, in Jules de Gaultier’s concept of ‘bovarysm’: ‘We now have an instrument that permits us to see into phenomenality, and we can give a name to the spectacle.’ I find the term ‘bovarysm’ totally inadequate, but let’s look into the reality behind it, that strange ‘phenomenality’.
Bovarysm as defined by Jules de Gaultier is ‘the faculty a human being has to conceive of himself or herself other than he/she is’, the exercise of this faculty sometimes causing ‘strange divergences from the apparently rigorous line of conduct and thought’. This general definition established, it’s possible to distinguish several categories. In addition to a perfectly normal bovarysm, necessary for evolution (‘the bovarysm of humanity’), there are various types of more extravagant bovarysm: the tragic bovarysm of the heroine in Flaubert’s novel, the bovarysm of the snob, and the bovarysm of genius, marked by excess and dispersal of energy. Rimbaud obviously enough, obviously enough for Segalen, belongs to the latter type – alongside (these are the examples brought forward by Gaultier) Ingres, who laid more store by his violin-playing than by his talents as a painter; Chateaubriand, who valued the politician and statesman in himself above the writer; Goethe, more interested in his naturalist studies than in his literary work. There, thinks Segalen, is an exact portrayal of Rimbaud: on the one hand, great poetic gifts, used nonchalantly; on the other, an obstinate determination to be a successful merchant and make a fortune – the overall result, an existence that seems totally incoherent.
Beyond the general defilnition and the various categories, Gaultier also tries to draw up a kind of psycho-sociological cartography, or existential geometry: ‘Imagine two lines emerging from the same ideal point in the human being. One represents all that is both real and virtual in that being: inherited tendency, natural disposition, native direction of energy. The other represents the image the person forms of himself, herself and of what he or she can become, ought to become – an image formed largely by environment, circumstance, education. Those two lines coincide to become one only if the drive coming from circumstantial environment moves in the same direction as the thrust of native energies.’ There again Segalen tries to convince himself that this schema applies perfectly to the case of Rimbaud: ‘In Rimbaud’s life, that converging of the two lines never took place, so that his total energy was prematurely dispersed in two entirely different directions.’
Quod erat demonstrandum.
After his essay Le Double Rimbaud (originally entitled Le Bovarysme d’Arthur Rimbaud ) had come out, Segalen wrote to Jules de Gaultier from Brest (letter of 20 April 1906), asking him if, in the case in point, he’d made a good application of the theory. Jules de Gaultier wrote back (letter from Condésur-Escaut, dated 25 April 1906) saying that in all honesty he didn’t really know. Certainly Segalen had handled the theory well, it seemed obvious enough that the case was one of ‘deviation from excess’ and that there was ample evidence of dispersal and aberration, but Gaultier confesses he just can’t see where Rimbaud was going, can’t make out ‘the image that hypnotized him’, the image that made him despise the activity to which his native gifts had predisposed him. He then tries himself, very tentatively, to get further into Rimbaud’s fi eld, saying that what strikes him about Rimbaud is ‘an extraordinary urgency, brutal in its force’, capable of transcending any image, and hence any imitation.
In Rimbaud’s case, he concludes, it looks as if there was some kind of ‘subconscious debate, going on in a region of turbulence prior to any distinct motivation’. Segalen replies (from Brest, May 15th 1906) that he’s perfectly willing to accept the hypothesis of a subconscious turmoil, but that he nonetheless feels he can distinguish several def i ned motivations: at the start, a tremendous desire for activity and power, later translated into a desire for wealth, security and peace. That said, concludes Segalen, he can’t be absolutely positive.
Rimbaud’s ‘field’ remains open, his ‘case’ unresolved.
5
Segalen’s letter of 15 May 1906 had begun with words in which it’s possible to discern a slight impatience, a desire to close the file and move on: ‘A final word on the Rimbaud question . . .’ But it was not to be. Three years later, in a letter dated 16 May 1909, he’s writing to Yvonne, his wife, about another essay on Rimbaud he has on the stocks, to be entitled Spectres (Ghosts) and which was to contain this piece of polemic: ‘You were out for the Real. You wrestled with it.
What vanity! To do so you cast off the most splendid of armours. You denied the poet in yourself, delighting in muscle and bone. But it was the poet you despised who was still leading your life. And out of vengeance, because you’d so ill judged him, he lead it to its ruin.’ Here the impatience in the letter of 1906 has become exasperation. But at the same time, Segalen is making a desperate attempt to trace, despite everything to the contrary, a coherence in Rimbaud’s life: the poet was always there. What’s obvious here too, in the very vocabulary (‘the most splendid of armours’), is how a certain Segalen, Segalen the artist, felt personally offended by the Rimbaud who’d laid aside all aesthetic trappings and walked naked. At one stage, compared to the stark, ravaged figure of Rimbaud in the desert of Abyssinia, Segalen comes across as an over-accoutred, symbol-ridden, attitudinizing dandy. But he himself still had long roads to travel, and he travelled them.
At the time when Segalen was finishing his essay ‘Le Double Rimbaud’, he had in his papers the rudiments of an essay on Gauguin, Gauguin dans son dernier décor (Gauguin’s fi nal setting). Both essays were to form part of a book, Les Hors-la-Loi (The Outlaws), that would also have contained a study on the mathematician Evariste Gallois, author of a revolutionary treatise on mathematics rejected as incomprehensible by the French Academy of Science. If Segalen had managed to complete this book, it would, I think, have been more significant, if perhaps less picturesque, than Verlaine’s Les Poètes maudits (The Outcasts). I think also that, during its composition, he might have changed his conception of Rimbaud and perhaps opened up a larger field. The bovaristic approach hadn’t really convinced him, and he was now beginning to see the real possibility of that paradoxical unity I evoked at the outset: ‘It may be that the two apparently so divergent aspects unite in an element that transcends them.’
6
Before trying to go farther, a few words about Gauguin, the closest parallel to ‘the man with the wind on his heels’, as Verlaine had called Rimbaud. Gauguin’s life is marked by the same kind of brownian movement as Rimbaud’s. At the age of 17, he was midshipman on the Luzitano, on the Le Havre-Rio line. Later on, he was mate on the Chili, before leaving the sea to become a banker in Paris, where he did well on the Stock Exchange until the financial crisis of 1882 made him decide to drop the money game (though he had recurrent pipe-dreams about making a fortune – for example, in the Pacific Ocean pearl-business), and leave for the painters’ colony in the little Breton village of Pont-Aven, before moving on, via Paris and Copenhagen, to the Panama Canal, Martinique, Tahiti and, finally, Hiva-Oa, where he penetrated deeper and deeper into a desert of solitude enlivened by flamboyant images of hell and paradise that yielded, in the very last instance, to that of a little Breton village under snow.
It was in the Marquesas, in early August 1903, that Segalen met the ‘ghost’ of Gauguin. At the offices of the island administration, he was lucky enough to come across ‘bits and pieces’ left by the painter, among them a box of papers containing Gauguin’s ‘scattered notes’ written, as Gauguin said in his preface, ‘with no logical sequence, like dreams, and made up of fragments, like life’. Segalen copied out passages, among them two which would seem, at least in part, to apply also to Rimbaud. One goes like this: ‘I’ve known misery, real rock-bottom misery – that is, hunger, cold and the rest. But that’s nothing, or almost nothing [. . .]. The really terrible thing about misery is that you can’t work, you can’t develop your intellectual faculties [. . .] Running after cash takes up three quarters of your time. It’s true that suffering puts an edge to genius. But not too much of it. Too much of it, and you’re dead.’ Here is the other: ‘I want to be happy, and you can be happy only if you’re free. But you’re free only if you are what you can be and what you must be. To be free means to satisfy the intimate needs of your being. You have to feel that you belong to yourself, that all your actions correspond to your nature. . .’
7
What still remains to be explored is Rimbaud’s final field.
If ‘bovarysm’ afforded Segalen a first significant approach to Rimbaud, its main function in the economy of this essay was to light up the early problematics of Segalen himself. Evident in the name of Emma Bovary invented by Flaubert is the conflict between aspiration and imagination on the one hand (Emma, close to the verb aimer, and which can be read, in quasi-lacanian terms, as ‘aime A’) and the opaque heaviness of reality on the other (Bovary, bovine). This of course is one of the main themes, if not the theme, of the novel in general, and for many still constitutes the basis of all art, with accent laid in various proportions on this or that side. Segalen begins in this context (idealism, realism), but the primary dialectic is gradually exhausted as he moves along the roads of Équipée and Thibet.
And Jules de Gaultier’s theory shows up as totally inadequate in the presence of someone like Goethe. When Goethe plunges into studies on botany, geology, optics, he is not, I submit, being unfaithful to himself, he is not diverging from his native talent and identity, he is attempting to extend the field of poetics, he is trying to open up a field beyond the habitual divisions and categories. Gaultier himself is obliged to admit that Goethe was ‘the first in botany to put forward the idea that the flower is the reproduction of the leaf, able as he was to see beyond superficial differences the unity of the physiological scheme’. In other words, not only is botanical information material for the extension of poetry, but poetic thinking can reveal hidden aspects of botany.
Another area that has to be looked into and cleared up before moving forward is that of religion. The influence of Christianity on Rimbaud is hardly to be denied. Not that he was a believer. Segalen was absolutely right to reject Claudel’s religious-visionary interpretation of that phrase in Le Bateau ivre, ‘At times I’ve seen what man thought he saw!’ ‘Rimbaud’, he writes in a letter of 15 March 1915 to Claudel, ‘gave expression above all to the indefinite anxiety of the human mind in its struggle with knowledge. It’s hardly justified to define this anxiety as the yearning towards such a definite and dogmatized God’. No, Rimbaud had long given up anything like faith, or the desire for faith – but he did feel himself ‘contaminated’.
If he spent so much of his life in wandering and, at the latter end, trudging along tracks of fire lined with the sun-bleached bones of camels, it was maybe to burn that contamination out of his body and mind.
But let’s look at the poetry.
In his reading of Rimbaud’s poems, Segalen distinguishes several tones and tendencies: a ‘note of pathos’, a ‘fine pagan inspiration’, and, above all perhaps, as he says in his commentary on Le Bateau ivre, ‘the move from a country to a world.’ Among all the Rimbaud poems, it’s Le Bateau ivre that attracts Segalen most. In its ‘thirty stupendous stanzas’ he sees not only ‘the most poignant, the most profound, of all poems of the sea’ (written, paradoxically enough, by someone who as yet had never been to sea or even seen the sea), but a kind of prophecy wherein Rimbaud foresees his future torments (‘tired martyr of the zones and poles’). In this poem, among a multitude of sense data, there are, says Segalen, moments when the mind escapes from the language of the senses and becomes aware of ‘unseen horizons’, ‘unheard of sensations’, all this expressed, most of the time, with ‘everyday, ordinary words.’ What marks for Segalen the poetry of Rimbaud in the last analysis is not ‘mere verbal skill’, not ‘sequences of images’ (still the hallmark of poetry for many), but a capacity to ‘assemble powerfully all the forces around’, ‘a telepathic grasp of space ’.
I emphasize that phrase, for there we are really going places.
As always in poet-to-poet readings of this type, Segalen is lining up there elements of the poetics he wants to practise himself. He finds them in Rimbaud, but not everywhere in Rimbaud, and even where they exist, they’re often overlaid with excrescences. What Segalen does not appreciate in Rimbaud (those ‘excrescences’) is his ‘extreme individualism’, his ‘obstinate obscurity’ (the famous ‘I alone hold the key to this wild pageant’), the lack in his work of ‘generality’. For Segalen, then, in Rimbaud’s work, among passages that illuminate the world like white lightning, there are too many personal evoca-tions, too many ‘associations of ideas that the incidents of mental life can create in any one brain but not in others’.
Segalen’s criticism might well have been accepted by Rimbaud. His own indictment, ‘it was wrong’, might apply to an activity he considered excessively introverted. And it could be, as I’ve suggested, that while, on the surface, hunting for a fortune, what Rimbaud was doing in the course of his wild stravaigings and during the askesis of his Abyssinian days was wearing out, burning out that ‘inside’. Throughout his essay, Le Double Rimbaud, Segalen wonders if ‘business over, fortune made’, Rimbaud would have come back to poetry. Who knows? Certainly, I would say, not to the same poetry, the same poetics. But to another, in time? The hypothesis will remain forever open. What must never be forgotten is that, with regard to literature, poetry, art, Rimbaud had demands which, to say the least, are not common. Take, for example, among his many unambiguous declarations, this: ‘Writers everywhere, but where’s a real author?’ By declarations such as this, by his general attitude, even more by his paradoxical movement, Rimbaud showed the distance between his ‘field’ and ‘the world of art and letters’. It wasn’t even contempt, it was total indifference. Rimbaud was not ‘a man of letters’ – Segalen himself recognized this, who concealed for long a ‘man of letters’ behind the ‘navy doctor’ of his social front. Let’s go further. If, at least up to Thibet, Segalen thinks metaphysically, Rimbaud lives, if I may say so, ultra-physically. In the final instance, there’s no ‘essential self’ in him – no self, no essence, nothing but an enormous energy and a burning silence.
8
As some no doubt will have already noticed, what I’m doing here is trace the path leading from egopoetics to geopoetics . . .
For Jules de Gaultier, and for Segalen (the early Segalen), the Goethe that turned to botany and geology had gone off the track, lost his way. As I’ve already indicated, I think the contrary. When he was writing his essay on granite, for example, he had the feeling both of giving a new foundation to his existence, and of opening up a new field of poetics.
I suggest (it’s my working hypothesis in this essay) that something similar happened to Rimbaud. Among those declarations I evoked, there is this (from the poem Fêtes de la faim): ‘If I have any taste left at all, it’s for earth and stones.’ There in Djibouti, Rimbaud’s ultimate place, his burning zone, Segalen comes face to face, on the Somali coast, with the Desert (he writes the word with a capital D):
. . . light that pulverizes, earth more raw and unrelenting than the sky itself, flavid sands [. . .]. The yellowish camels, bound at the knees, hobble to an upright position with jerks of the head. Little goats come to take an inquisitive look at you. Then it all starts to move forward on the endless track [. . .]. The light grows. Even the shadows are sharp to the eye. Thin sounds in the air, like the tinkling of little bells, the clink of camels’ bones. All kinds of golden, acrid dust make you think of incense – not the edulco-rated stuff you find in rich parishes, but those impure resins still redolent with other aromas of the earth . . .
He copies out passages from volume 13 (‘Southern Africa’) of the Géographie universelle composed by Reclus: ‘The Somali country:
that neat triangle, two sides of it maritime, meeting at Gardafui, the old “Promontory of Perfumes”, the other line mountainous, with the Harrar at the centre’; ‘Those of the North are strict Muslims but in the South and inland the Somali have kept to animistic superstition. They revere trees and stones.’ And it’s in the pages of Elisée Reclus that Segalen comes across a report on the desert of the Harrar sent in by Rimbaud to the Geographical Society of Paris (first published in the annals of that Society, n° 3, 1 February 1884):
On some well-watered mountain sides, such as those of the Gan-Libache, there is superb vegetation, no less beautiful than that of the hills of Ethiopia. Mengès the naturalist has noted the presence of giant juniper and the magnificent djibara [. . .]. The central area, Ogaden, is, according to Sottiro, a vast steppe region. After the light rains that fall there, it’s a sea of tall grass, interrupted in several places by fields of stones.
A text ‘written by a merchant, not an artist’, is Segalen’s verdict.
I’m not so sure.
Maybe it’s neither an artist’s text, nor a merchant’s text, but the tentative approach to another type of text altogether.
Could it be that Rimbaud’s ‘Abyssinia book’ would have been an approach to geopoetics?
from the book The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 2 Mappings Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape
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