Rimbaud & the Mystic Way 1

Apparently it is virtually impossible to talk about Arthur Rimbaud's writings without talking about his life. Most critics, before the post-structuralist period, interpret Rimbaud's earlier poetry, the Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer (as well as the "voyant" letters Rimbaud wrote to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny in May 1871), by explaining, in various ways, Rimbaud's psychological state at the time the work was written. Wallace Fowlie, for example, begins his early study Rimbaud (1946) by saying "the poetry of Rimbaud is childhood itself," equating the poetry with the person, and Henry Miller says flatly, "With Rimbaud, creation and experience were virtually simultaneous" (The Time of the Assassins, 99).1 [For notes, see link at bottom of page] One critic feels compelled to point out that Enid Starkie's critical biography Arthur Rimbaud is more biography than criticism, but her book gives the clear impression that the smallest details of Rimbaud's life are essential for interpreting his writings accurately, in other than post-structuralist contexts.
That critics would proceed on a biographical-psychological basis is understandable. For one thing Rimbaud's life is fascinating because of the incredible intensities of emotion, intellect and bad luck which seemed to go everywhere with him. Or again, his sister Isabelle and her husband set out deliberately after Rimbaud's death in 1891 to concoct a legend around his life, much as Nietzsche's sister tried to do. One story which stuck, and which is still repeated and explained, was that Une Saison en enfer was Rimbaud's "farewe1l" to literature, Isabelle and her husband claiming that Rimbaud destroyed all printed copies and never wrote another line of poetry. The story captured the impressionable imaginations of many young poets at the turn of the century, but in 1914 a Belgian critic found the entire edition of the book in the print shop basement, languishing there because Rimbaud simply didn't have the money to pay the printer's bill in 1873.
The story nonetheless framed textual questions of intense interest for the next sixty years: what, if anything (apart from letters and a few travel pieces for the British Geographical Society), did Rimbaud write after August of 1873, and is there textual evidence to show that some of the Illuminations were written in 1873 or 18747 The debates are clever, numerous and interesting, although their specifics are not important to the focus of this paper. Some say all the Illuminations were written by 1872; others date them after 1873; others say they were written before during and after 1873.2 One point of agreement is that during 1874 Rimbaud expressed to Paul Verlaine and Germain Nouveau an interest in publishing the Illuminations.
This fact is significant to this discussion because it means Rimbaud did not completely dismiss literature after the personal struggle he endured in completing Une Saison en enfer. In his sister's legend, Rimbaud's farewell to literature upon completing Une Saison can be understood as an extravagant gesture by a disillusioned young man of letters. Part of the force of Une Saison, however, inheres in the powerful sense that the spiritual sufferings recorded there were real, not only imaginatively, but literally. These sufferings, furthermore, resemble the personal sufferings of many western mystics, and at this point, Rimbaud's actual experience becomes of great interest. We are no longer asking only what Rimbaud means by all this confusing imagery, but also if, more than engaging in a literary endeavor, he is describing the human soul in a quest for divinity.
As a mere gesture, a farewell to literature would strongly suggest an essentially literary or aesthetic endeavor in which the struggle was to write great poetry. But if the struggle was to find God, the poems themselves being the struggle's expressive by-product, then in mystical terms it makes sense that Rimbaud would renounce. in a fit of despair, a method of spiritual awakening which involved creative activity (the writing of poetry) as an essential element. It would also make sense for him to regain an interest in his poetry after surfacing from the despair again. He did regain his interest in publishing the Illuminations, but as this essay will show, there were specific spiritual reasons for ceasing to write poetry.
To understand these cryptic remarks and explain why Rimbaud's poetry is not simply radical poetic experimentation, but the record

of a mystic or contemplative life, Evelyn Underhill's description of the five stages of mystic experience, and some specific terminology of contemplative poetry developed by Arthur Clements in Poetry of Contemplation, provide a framework. While Starkie, Gwendolyn Bays and others speak specifically of Rimbaud's use of alchemical and occult ideas in his poetry (details useful in sorting out specific imagery), the aim of this essay is to make the mystical, or contemplative elements of Rimbaud's life and poetry clear. Rimbaud's biography really is important in this context because not only is his poetry childhood itself, but it conveys in the purest possible terms Rimbaud's spiritual life between 1871 and 1873. His poetry and his life seem inextricable from each other.
Underhill's overview of the mystic way provides a key to understanding the transcendental process which most mystics, and Rimbaud, follow in their lives and describe in their writings. In her classic study Mysticism, Underhill explains the five stages in the mystic's progress toward God: l) Awakening or Conversion; 2) Purgation; 3) Illumination; 4) Purification or the Dark Night of the Soul; and 5) Union.3 Rimbaud proceeded through the first four of these stages and broke off before attaining actual contemplative "union." The whole process is tied in complicated ways to his writing: when he ceases writing, he ceases his intense drive toward God, as shown at the end of Une Saison en enfer, to be discussed in more detail later.

Conversion
Underhill describes the first stage, Conversion, as "a sharp and sudden break with the old and obvious way of seeing things" (Mysticism, 192). Conversion is a reaction of the natural self, as opposed to the social or normal self, to an "uprush of new truth" (194). In Rimbaud's case, conversion coincides with adolescence, when, having been the prize student, he at the age of fifteen drops out of school and focuses attention on two things: poetry, and escaping from his domineering mother. It is not clear that Rimbaud's conversion involved a vision or a transcendent experience; probably it did not. But it did involve a personal awakening to the strictures of both personal and social life, strictures which he found intolerable and set out to change.
His personal and social life was dominated by his mother and the church, and as his poetry progressed rapidly out of an imitative stage, he began to write more original poems critical of the church and religion generally - critical, and eventually worse, as in his famous piece of graffiti "Dieu merde," and in "Les Premiers Communions," where he begins:

Vraiment, c'est bête, ces églises des villages
Oú quinze laids marmots encrassant les piliers
Ecoutent, grasseyant les divins babillages,
Un noir grotesque dont fermentent les souliers
(Oeuvres, 121)4

and ends speaking of "Christ! ô Christ, éternel voleur des énergies" (126). This is no conventional awakening, and there is no reason to think at this point that it has anything to do with mystical or contemplative problems at all. Rimbaud exhibits typical adolescent rebellion. but unlike most boys his age, acts it out in poetry. With Rimbaud the rebellion is complicated because at this early age he is already aware of his own opposition to the oppressive moral and social climate of his culture, a climate other writers, such as Baudelaire. Flaubert. Villiers and Nietzsche, would also react to strongly.
With Rimbaud the reaction is more violent and intense. Viewing the church - the traditional moral and spiritual center of society-as ugly (and probably inimical to spiritual matters) and as the upholder of conventional morality, his impulse is to reject and even to foul it. Significantly, his inner rejection of the church and Christ is also a poetic act. Even this early, poetry is part of the process of his life and not an ornament or career. His natural adolescent awakening is instantly elevated to an intense personal struggle against everything he knows, which is his "break with the old obvious way of seeing things."

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