Nadia Rosen

Looking At Rimbaud Through The Camera Obscura
A Study Of Rimbaud Le Fils 1 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).
Pierre Michon, Vies minuscules (Paris : Gallimard, 1984).
3
Ibid., 190.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid., 190-1.
2
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.
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.
7
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.
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.
11
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 làdedans 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
17
Ibid., 20.
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.
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.
19
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.
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.
26
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.
Ibid., 32.
30
Ibid., 68.
31
Ibid., 29.
32
Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 17.
29
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.
Ibid., 72.
35
Pierre Michon, Vies minuscules, (Paris : Gallimard, 1984) 190.
36
Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 101-2.
34
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
39
Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils (Paris : Gallimard, 1991), 54.
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.