L’EnfantPeuple:

Rimbaud,Vallès,LiteraryPolitics,andtheLegacyoftheCommune

ȱ
ȱ

ATHESISSUBMITTEDTOTHEFACULTYOFTHEGRADUATESCHOOLOF

THEUNIVERSITYOFMINNESOTA

BY


RobertA.St.Clair

INPARTIALFULFILLMENTOFTHEREQUIREMENTS

FORTHEDEGREEOF

DOCTOROFPHILOSOPHY

MáriaMinichBrewer,Advisor

BrunoChaouat,CoAdvisor

June2011
 Copyright ©
Robert A. St. Clair, 2011
 i

Acknowledgements

As no order could ever adequately express the importance of their contributions or

the extent of my gratitude for their collaboration and support, the following friends,
mentors, and family are listed here in no particular order at all.
My parents, for making sure I went to college and not out west in a box-car, as
initially planned (there are of course more things to thank them for than there are
footnotes in the present work, but I’d like to single out this one in the hopes that it will
bring a smile to their faces). Judith Preckshot, for her tireless and assiduous efforts when
she was the DGS in 2006 to help make sure my dossier d’admission to the University of
Minnesota’s French Department was a successful one. I’d like to recognize Judith
Preckshot and Eileen Sivert, too, for helping me prepare for the job market by giving me
a chance to teach the 3101 course – it was a thrill from start to finish, one that provided
invaluable professional experience to a young academic, and the even greater privilege of
sharing my work on Rimbaud with the students at the University of Minnesota. Thanks to
Dan Brewer for reading a very early version of the work on David’s Bara that figures in
chapter 2, and to Dana Lindaman for inviting me to Harvard in the spring of 2010 to
share my work on Rimbaud with his poetry class – it proved to be a trip that was both
delightful and immensely productive (extra thanks for sharing Charles Marville’s photos
of pre-Haussmann Paris). To the Department of French and Italian at the University of
Minnesota for the intellectual, professional, and financial assistance I have benefitted
from over the past five years. I would also like to recognize Armand Renaud, whose
enlightened and generous gift to the French Department allowed me to attend the
Dartmouth Institute in the summer of 2007, and Hella Mears and the Center for German
and European Studies, whose material support allowed me to spend a very productive
summer drafting up the third chapter of this work, as well as an essay and a presentation
that may have, if indirectly, helped me earn a job. My thanks, too, to the College of
Liberal Arts for their generous support over the 2009-2010 academic year. Their Doctoral
Dissertation Fellowship allowed me to write a dissertation that was not only coherent, but
manage (I think to everyone’s relief) to write in fewer than 1000 pages. Many sincere
thanks to Seth Whidden for his intellectual generosity and spontaneous encouragement.
 ii

Special thanks to Steve Jaksa for his intellectual companionship and inimitable friendship
over more years than I care to count, and whose continued presence never fails to remind
me that there are simply some things in life that “enjambent l’absence,” as René Char
once put it. In a similar vein, my thanks to Christian Haines for the delightful and always
provocative Wednesday night conversations at the Leaning Tower of Pizza – an
improbable (or improbably utopic) place if ever there was one to begin, as the line goes, a
beautiful friendship.
To the committee of this dissertation, for their unfailing intellectual, academic,
and material support, I acknowledge a debt approaching the unfathomable. Eileen
Sivert’s sense of humor and humanity, her familiarity with the 19th-century canon, and
her willingness to work outside of class on an independent study (that subsequently
informed the conclusion of the present work) when I know for a fact that she was far too
busy to do so speaks to her inspiring commitment to her students and to French literature.
John Mowitt taught me how to read critical theory in his seminars on socio-criticism and
semiotics and, indeed, a passing glance at this work’s bibliography would suffice to give
the reader a sense of the importance this generous scholar has had on my writing,
thinking, and reading. Indeed, the pieces on David’s Bara and the idea for the chapter on
Rimbaud’s “Le Dormeur du Val” came from the stimulating conversations I’ve had with
him over the years, in class and out. It is thanks to Christophe Wall-Romana that I even
had the courage to write a dissertation in part on Arthur Rimbaud. He was the first
professor I had the extreme good fortune to talk with when I arrived at the University of
Minnesota. When I told him I wanted to work on Rimbaud and the Commune, Christophe
smiled, gave me a pile of books that, when stacked in my arms, surpassed my head (an
appropriate metaphor, as it turns out), and said, “We’ll have some reading to do, then.” It
was only years later, when an “important scholar” from a French department that shall
remain nameless breathlessly opined “Oh, Rimbaud, there’s really nothing more to say
about him,” that I realized how profoundly ethical Christophe’s gesture of academic
encouragement was. The only adequate way of thanking him for encouraging me to not
only puzzle over the authors I’ve read for this work, but to firmly believe in the merit and
fecundity of that puzzlement is to hope one day to do the same for a student in turn.
Bruno Chaouat’s enthusiastic commitment to this project, often responding to drafts sent
 iii

out within a matter of hours, and with more perspicuous and provocative comments than
I knew what to do with, to say nothing of his rigorously unfailing attention to the smallest
detail in any text or argument, and amiably unflappable encouragement has made the
process of writing this dissertation an enjoyable one. His ceaseless dedication, immense
erudition and ineffable generosity have been invaluable and inspiring from start to last.
Last, but by no means least, I’d like to thank Mária Brewer. Mária’s was the first seminar
I took at the University of Minnesota. Out of her class, came a project on Vallès, the
beginnings of a reflection on the Commune, and an idea for thinking about the figure of
the child and alterity in 19th-century French literature. In sum, without realizing it, I
began writing this dissertation in Mária Brewer’s graduate seminar on Childhood as a
Site of Modernity in the fall of 2006. A project can clearly change immensely from the
moment one imagines it to the moment it is “out-there” in a finished form. I’d like to
thank Mária Brewer, then, for her impeccable mentorship and advising, and for
supporting my project when it was no doubt abundantly clear that I didn’t have the
slightest idea where I was going with it. Mária was always there in such moments, an
utterly invaluable and stalwartly patient counterpart to my own nervous personality, to
remind me that I was up to the task, and that, in any event, the committee had my back.
For that, as well as for her exceptional collaboration, the invitations to come to her
undergraduate class to talk about Rimbaud (the points of departure for the first and
second chapters of this dissertation), her countless letters of recommendation, and her
judicious direction and advice over the years, I owe her a deep debt of gratitude.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Sophie, and our son, Arthur Jules Thomas. I
dedicate this work to them both: to her, for putting up with a thésard with a strangely
infinite patience that must be love or madness, and to him in the hopes that his life shall
be long, happy, and agitée.

R.A.S.
 iv

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i-iii

Table of Contents iv-v

Introduction 1-26

I. History, Hermeneutics, Poetics: A Word on Methodology – II. On the Infans and the
Demos: Representations of Difference in 19th-Century French Discourse – III. Structure
of the Present Work

Chapter 1: In Democracy’s Green Cabaret 27-120

I. Situating the Texts – II. What is a Cabaret? – III. A propos of Nothing: Rimbaud and
the Evidence of the Common – IV. How to Make Poor Use of an Alexandrine –V.
L’Adorable, or Beauty Decanonized – VI. Nina, or: Don’t Forget to Laugh – Conclusion

Chapter 2: An Exquisite Cadaver: “Le Dormeur du Val,” 121-229

Between a (Body)Politics of Community and an Aesthetics of Absence

Introduction – I. Epigraph: The Deaths of Joseph Bara – II. The Infinite Nude and the
Naked Truth of the Revolution – III. The Envious Destiny of Joseph Bara, Puer Novo of
the Revolution – IV. Some Hermeneutical Problems in “Le Dormeur du Val” – V.
Context: Rimbaud and the Sonnet in 1870 – VI. A Brief Genealogy of Some
Hermeneutical Tendencies – VII. What’s so “Tranquille” about the “Dormeur”? – VIII.
Archaeologies of the Dormeur: On the Historical Context – IX. Canons and Cannons: Is
the “Dormeur” a Founding Text of the Nation-State? – X. A (Very Brief) Genealogy of
Trauma as a Psychoanalytic Problem – XI. Repetitions – XII. Absence, or: Why You
Don’t Have to Stumble Upon a Dead Body to Write a Sonnet about One – XIII.
L’Homme, cette nuit: The Sleeper’s Strange Use of Time – XIV. Post-Traumatic Sonnet
Syndrome – XV. Conclusions. Christ Asleep in the Valley, or: in what Sense is the
Dormeur a Christic Figure ?

Chapter 3: The Infantile Community: 230-346

Writing Resistance and Memory in the Aftermath of the Commune

I. The Book of Laughter and Remembering – II. Lex Oblivionis, or: Don’t Forget to
Remember to Forget – III. Le Cercle zutique, or: How to Make Enemies and Alienate
People – IV. On Parody and Genius: Methods and Theories of Writing, Community, and
Critique – V. Rimbaud’s Zuteries and Parody – VI. “Paris”: Memory, Community, and
 v

Anti-capitalism in the Capital – VII. Soyons donc Chrétiens? – VIII. That Obscure Object
of Parody: “Le Sonnet du Trou du Cul,” or, Writing Hand in Hand

Chapter 4: Writing the Revolution of the Voiceless: 347-405

Jules Vallès’s Enfant-Insurgé

Introduction. Failing Again, Failing Better – I. Writing in the Key of Indiscipline – II.
Family (and) Discipline – III. Tactical Irony and the Livre-Ecran – IV. The Other-Child –
V. Perspectives

Epilogue: 406-454
The Return of the Commune

I. How (not) to Write about an Event, or: the “Problem” with the Commune – II.
Democratizing the B.D., or: a Tardi-ve Re-Writing of the Commune – III. An-Archic
Cinema: Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1871) – IV. Conclusion(s): Encountering
Literary Politics and the Legacy of the Commune

Bibliography 455- 474

 1

Introduction

History, Hermeneutics, Poetics: A Word on Methodology

The purpose of this introduction is to define the specificity of the conceptual

figures that I am calling infans and demos – two interrelated, if antagonistic, figures

deployed in nineteenth-century French discourse and history, and with which we shall be

engaging throughout the course of the present work. For clarity’s sake, we should

understand “discourse” to be taken in its largest sense as any “text” with a written or

visual rhetorical strategy, and the reader should thus not be surprised when s/he

encounters sources as varied as caricature, medical discourse and journalism alongside

more “traditional” textual artifacts such as poems and novels.

First, a word about the methodology of this work, and then a claim about the

conceptual figures, the infans/demos, that I argue Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Vallès

problematize in their oeuvres. In the present work, we will principally be reading the

above-mentioned French authors. The latter was a well-known radical journalist who,

during his exile after the Paris Commune, wrote three novels that form what is known as

the Vingtras trilogy. Vallès continues to be an author from the nineteenth century whose

work has suffered from a certain degree of critical neglect. Although his novels were

generally appreciated by his contemporaries, this enthusiasm was dampened by his well-

known association with the Paris Commune. Today, he is considered by specialists of

nineteenth-century French literature as an important late-century author, but one whose

work fails in some sense to cohere with the esthetic and literary categories of his time.

Furthermore, his trilogy has frequently been the victim of a critical fragmentation that

separates the first book, L’Enfant, from the following books of the trilogy, Le Bachelier
 2

and L’Insurgé. Our aim in reading Vallès is to propose that such a fragmentation is

untenable, and that it indeed misses the fundamental point that Vallès was trying to make

about French society in the nineteenth century when he linked together in an esthetic and

political dialectic both the child and the people.

When it comes to the reception of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic oeuvre, the situation

is in many respects the exact opposite. Rimbaud is without a doubt one of the most well-

known poets of the nineteenth century, if not in French literature. Indeed, the sheer mass

of scholarship generated by this celebrity in fact made the task of writing about his work

a daunting one. Yet this initial obstacle revealed itself in final analysis to be a productive

one. For Rimbaud is, for reasons we shall see in the body of this work, a poet known

perhaps most of all for his poems in prose. There are exceptions, of course, to this rule.

“La Bateau Ivre” and “Le Dormeur du Val,” two poems written during the period that

interests us (i.e., 1870-1871) are amongst the most well-known, most frequently

anthologized, and most frequently studied poetic texts in French literature. It is my belief,

however, that this emphasis on the prose poems which contributed to his canonization not

only comes at the obvious expense of his early poems in verse written at the time of the

Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, but also at the expense of the politics of

these verse poems – politics which are, I argue, communard through and through. The

closer one looks at the reception of Rimbaud’s work in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, the more a curious detail emerges. To wit, there clearly remain poems in the

Rimbaldian corpus whose literary politics, whose connection to contemporary democratic

struggles that I believe are exemplified in the figure of the enfant-peuple, have been

overlooked for reasons that are over-determined by hermeneutic, historical, and poetic
 3

problems. For instance, “Le Dormeur du Val,” the text with which we shall be

preoccupied in the second chapter of this study, is a poem whose “meaning” has been

ostensibly settled on for a good thirty years. Thus, our task is two-fold: on the one hand,

we will prove that even a canonical text’s meaning can be “unsettled,” and on the other

we will perform this unsettling by showing how the neglect to take into simultaneous

account formal poetic disruptions and historical context has led at the very least to major

aporias in the readings of Rimbaud’s poetry from this period. When we read Rimbaud’s

poems, then, we will be fastidiously attentive to both the text and its context, to both the

esthetic and the political. The methodology in the first and third chapters of this

dissertation consists in taking a “main” text by Rimbaud, attempting as exhaustively as

possible to contextualize its relationship to the upheavals of the era, advancing a new,

theoretically informed reading of the poem, and concluding with a secondary text by the

poet which we shall closely read in the light of our findings from the theoretical,

historical, and poetic findings produced by our work on the “main” text. As we are

dealing in these chapters with such a well-known figure of French literature, in order to

make epistemologically valid and critically informed statements that contribute to, rather

than rehash, scholarship on the poet’s work, it is necessary for us to spend a considerable

amount of time engaging with text, intertext, and, as we said, context. In the poem, “Au

Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir,” it will not be enough for us to draw attention to the

fact that no other critic has commented on the choice of situating a sonnet in a cabaret.

Such a lapsus produces readings that cannot but pass over the poem’s politics, and it will

be our task to show the reader that this choice is anything but innocent, as in the late

nineteenth century, the cabaret is a site closely associated with revolutionary politics. We
 4

will proceed in a very similar light when we read Rimbaud’s sonnet “Paris,” that is, we

shall spend some time constructing a contextual and theoretical framework that will allow

us subsequently to apprehend new readings of poems long considered either dead letter or,

in some cases, too minor to merit sustained interest.

On the Infans and the Demos:

Representations of Difference in nineteenth-Century French Discourse

At present, I’d like to advance a conceptual claim. The novelty of this work

perhaps resides in its argument that there are two crucial figures of difference in

nineteenth-century discourse: the infans and the demos.1 Yet before we go any further, I

feel it is necessary to assert that the infans and the demos cannot be separated from each

other, as the hyphenated title of this dissertation suggests – the one always entails (a

relationship, a proximity to) the other. Representing the working-classes, le peuple, as

childish does not exclude the possibility of the infans being converted into the demos, or

vice versa. The infans is simply another name for the demos – it is the demos prior to an

event involving revolutionary political subjectivation. In this work, the name for that

event in Rimbaud and Vallès is the Paris Commune.

The infans and the demos are what the French philosopher Michel Foucault would

call disciplinary technologies of power. Their objective is to coherently construct and

manage class, gender, sexual, and ethnic difference in the mid-nineteenth century. They

are produced by, but also produce, cognitive and symbolic strategies for comprehending

the upheavals of “modernity” in nineteenth-century metropolitan French literature and

society (by modernity, we refer not so much to an “age” or “era” that can be

1
Infans is latin for “infant,” and literally means “one who cannot speak”. Demos is Greek for the people (it
referred to the inhabitants of a community known as a deme).
 5

unproblematically bracketed off, but rather to a heterogeneous esthetic, political, and

epistemic movement occurring with the rise of the bourgeoisie as an intellectual, artistic,

economic, and political force at the end of the eighteenth century). The infans and the

demos are therefore to be understood perhaps less as figures per se, than they are to be

understood as procedures for creating a kind of truth about alterity in the nineteenth

century. Simply put, this “truth” holds that the “Other” is somehow infantile,

characterized by silence, or a lack of meaningful speech; on the side of phônè as opposed

to logos. It is not a question of whether or not the infans can speak – such a question is, at

base, rhetorical, as is my use of the term infans and its supposed silence: of course the

infans can speak. The working-class poets of the 1840s, the guild representatives coming

back from Universal expositions in the 1860s, the numerous ad hoc public meetings at

the end of the Second Empire, and the councils of the Fédérés of the Commune, for

instance, demonstrate this point. The case of the public meetings, debates, political clubs,

and deliberations amongst the members of the Commune indeed suggest to a somewhat

tragic degree that the infans is anything but silent. Indeed, in the period between the July

Revolution and Napoléon III’s coup d’état (1830-1851), there was a particularly vibrant

and at times violent working-class movement in France.2 Amongst the many pressing

issues that various popular associations debated – issues such as education, economic

literacy, constituting molecular networks of solidarity in preparation for conflict with the

patronat or the police – one of the more pressing was the highly symbolic question of

“naming oneself”. Gaining access to discourse – often through workers’ journals like

2
See Alain Faure, “Mouvements populaires et mouvements ouvriers à Paris (1830-1834),” Le Mouvement
Social 88 (Jul.-Sep. 1974), pp. 51-92. This period also saw the explosion of workers’ newspapers and the
birth of the workers’ poetry movement under the paternalistic guidance of Alphonse de Lamartine and
Georges Sand.
 6

L’Atelier –3 as a mode of defining the individual its relationship to larger communities

was just as important as any other, ostensibly more practical question. 4 Rather than

mobilizing the infans, what one sees at the level of the archive of the text is a contest

taking place around denominations – the pinning of identity to an essentialized name that

produces historically and discursively related situations of domination, and designates

that identity as either infantile, or too dangerous to be allowed into the proverbial city.

Hence, being able to designate oneself in discourse and practice in the nineteenth century,

whether through the invention of a name or the re-appropriation of a vocable (such as that

of prolétaire),5 whose initial function was to symbolically and politically marginalize or

silence the one thus named, constituted a powerful point of entry back into the symbolic

and political community of the human. It was, in short, the refusal to recognize oneself as

innommable, as an abject site of absolute difference.

At base, then, the point is not to ascertain whether or not such or such subject is a

speaking subject (they are, of course), but rather in which conditions they are, or can be,

heard. Succinctly put, my claim concerning the figure of the child in mid-to-late

nineteenth-century French discourse, society, and politics is that it is linked-up with

representations of what we might call the social-Other of the nineteenth century, and in

particular (but not exclusively) with the working-classes, and their portrayal as an

3
See La parole ouvrière, 1830-1850, Jacques Rancière et Alain Faure, eds. (Paris : Union Générale
d’Editions, 1976).
4
See on this Jacques Rancière’s essay on the worker uprisings and popular educational movements of the
1830s, “Savoirs hérétique et émancipation du pauvre,” in Les sauvages dans la cité: auto-émancipation du
peuple et instruction des prolétaires au XIXe siècle, Jean Borreil, ed. (Paris : Champ Vallon, 1985), pp. 34-
53. See also Rancière’s La nuit des prolétaires: archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris : Fayard, 1981).
5
Proletariat, etymologically, designated one who had no “name” (no, patronymic identity) and who was
thereby forever excluded from participating in the political life of the City; according to Cicero, for
example, the proletarii were subjects sempiternally suspended in the present, without past or future. Their
purpose was mere reproduction (of themselves and the social order) See Jean Boreil, “Présentation,” ibid.,
p. 24.
 7

essentially “childish” (and childishly violent) group of unreasonable subjects. Indeed, in

some texts, this mise en adéquation can be quite explicit, and the child is quite simply a –

if not the – representative of the working and, for many nineteenth-century

contemporaries, dangerous classes. Michelet comes particularly to mind. In his 1846

history of the popular classes in France, the romantic historian makes the following

claim: “To speak only of our present subject [i.e., the working classes], nobody will

really penetrate it if he has not studied the child. The child is the interpreter of the people

(…). The child is the people themselves in their native truth before they are deformed.” 6

The infans-demos is, then, a multiple category that results from a discursive

process of inscribing, classifying and pinning of an identity of difference to the

marginalized. Metaphorically we might think of a medallion, on the obverse side the

infans and on the reverse side the peuple or the demos.7 It is highly stratified to the extent

that it is a strange singular obscuring a multiplicity of identities. Infans-demos, then, is

less a subject than a semiological process of subjectivation that fixes and classes –

produces a “truth” of – certain identities as infantile, as “voiceless”.8 Infantilization may

6
Jules Michelet, The People (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 120. My italics. When first
introducing us to Gavroche, Victor Hugo undertakes a characteristically taxonomical approach to the gamin
de Paris in terms that resonate with Michelet’s citation quite closely. For Hugo, as for Gustave Flaubert,
Georges Sand, Jules Michelet, or for that matter the former prefect Louis Canler and the ultra-reactionary
Armand de Pontmartin, le peuple is truly something of an “eternal minor,” or, as Hugo states in Les
Misérables: “Quant au peuple parisien, même homme fait, il est toujours gamin; peindre l’enfant, c’est
peindre la ville.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, t. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 754.
7
I might be accused here of surreptitiously sneaking Ferdinand de Saussure into this work. However, the
hypothesis that I hope to explore is that the infans and the demos, the child and the people, form a
signifying unit for much of the nineteenth century. The metaphor does stumble a bit, however, in that it
suggests a simple, dyadic articulation, whereas I would argue that there are a multiplicity of subjectivities
that are pinned to the child in nineteenth-century discourse and practices. Perhaps a more appropriate image
is that of a series of cut-out paper-dolls, with one silhouette providing the model for an entire chain of “cut-
outs”.
8
Ross Chambers alludes in passing to such a figure in nearly exactly the same terms I propose here in his
Story and Situation. Indeed, I can think of no better description for the passage from infans to demos that
one attends to in Rimbaud’s verse, Vallès’s prose, and indeed the historical event of the Paris Commune
than the following: “it is now the turn of those deprived of the power to speak to make meaning.” Ross
 8

be a more adequate term for describing the productive phenomenon that takes place in

literary – and other discursive – representations of the marginalized, if we understand the

term as a semiological and epistemological production that insists on a child-like “nature”

so as to disqualify certain subject positions, to preclude their participation in the sphere of

the political. I would argue, furthermore, that the telos of such representations tends

towards ratifying what Jacques Rancière has called an unjust partage du sensible

governed by a constitutive “wrong” – a repartition of the sensible world that is governed

by a police logic of socio-political organization, a logic that insists on the adequacy of

bodies and functions, of essence and place.9 To my mind, although such a ratification of

unequal political distributions of speech, roles, and beings in nineteenth-century French

society functions to discipline marginalized subjectivities (i.e., they are indeed highly

class-bound strategies of producing “norms,” including situations of domination that are

to be accepted as “normal”),10 it is to be noted that there is no one, nefarious agent or

conspiratorial group explicitly out to keep the “damned of the earth” in their place, even

if the systematic organization of domination certainly ends up doing so. Rather, the

figures of the infans and the demos are generated in nineteenth-century France by a kind

of inherent tension produced in the gap separating the democratic, egalitarian ideals of

the French revolution and the political, economic, historical, and symbolic reality of a

Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 46.
9
Rancière’s concept of the “police” and of a “police logic” governing the sphere of the political is, to
simplify somewhat, a return to Plato’s ideal city, with everyone in his/her place. See, inter alia, his La
Haine de la démocratie (Paris:La Fabrique, 2005), and especially his Disagreement:Politics and
Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), inter alia, pp. 1-21, 99-100, 121.
10
It is precisely for such a reason that one of the more richly textured terms that Ross Chambers elaborated
for describing and analyzing the problematic of ideology touches on those unspoken libidinal and
imaginary structures that position us as subjects in (rather than of) relations of power and enunciation in our
daily lives. Chambers’s term – the deployment of which I shall also retain to account for the question of
ideology in this work – for these unspoken codes, structures, and situations is indeed the infans. See The
Writing of Melancholy, op. cit., p. 11.
 9

society based on exploitation organized largely (though not solely) along class lines. It is

thus possible to find something like a working definition of this partage du sensible as

easily in the pages of the Journal des débats11 as in Jules Michelet (whom one definitely

would not consider accusing of being a political reactionary). Indeed, if we’re looking for

an adequate description of the kind of tort, or fundamental contradiction in French

society and politics that gave rise to the nearly constant revolutionary upheavals in

nineteenth-century France, we really need look no further than Jules Michelet’s course at

the Collège de France known as L’Étudiant. In it, we find a particularly complex analysis

of class difference in mid-century France articulated on the very eve of the 1848

Revolution – that is, at the very moment of the first major revolution to distinctly and

explicitly divide the question of “democracy in France” along class-lines.

[L]es circonstances sont-elles les mêmes entre nous, privilégiés du loisir, du savoir, et les
hommes du travail? Ont-ils le temps d’étudier, de chercher ? Quand ils l’auraient, la
fatigue n’est-elle pas un obstacle ? A-t-on toute la liberté de ses facultés inventives, la
vive et féconde alacrité de l’esprit, quand on revient las le soir, qu’on trouve le foyer
froid, et, autour d’une table nue, des enfants souffreteux et malades ? (…) Il y aura
toujours sur terre (…) une fatalité du temps et du travail (…) ; [P]artons de l’idée que le
devoir de l’invention est plus obligatoire pour l’homme de loisir que pour l’homme de
travail.12

Michelet’s version of the nineteenth-century partage du sensible, governed as it is

by the ineluctable (and inevitably undemocratic) fatality of time, leisure, and reflection

that Rancière first critiques in his study of the 1830-1840s worker-poet movement in La

nuit des prolétaires,13 could be read as the exact inverse of Marx’s democratic vision of

society where citizens are free to use their time in a multiplicity of heterogeneous,

11
This was a newspaper commonly regarded as a mouthpiece of the political right in the nineteenth
century.
12
Jules Michelet, L’Étudiant (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1899), pp. 12-13.
13
Jacques Rancière La Nuit des prolétaires: archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris : Fayard, 1981).
 10

undisciplined manners 14 that precisely unbind one’s being from their “place” (or lack

thereof) in society.15 The problem of politics, of democracy, of “having one’s say” and

disposing of one’s time and being freely depends, however, on perceptions of one’s body

and being in space and time – that is, on esthetic categories as they imbricate with

political “wrongs”. Thus, the purpose of the present work will be to explore, problematize,

and account for the conjunction of the esthetic and the political in what I propose to call

Rimbaud and Vallès’s communard literary politics. The literary politics that can be

located in their works seeks to accomplish at least three goals: first, to counter-

discursively contest and destabilize the figure of the infans by drawing attention to its

contingent, class-bound “constructedness”; second, to produce and valorize alternate

forms of speech and esthetico-political representations of the infans within literature –

that is, to produce in literature a formal democratic dislocation of bodies, functions, and

roles that allows for the demos, the subject of political disagreement, to emerge; and,

finally, to seek to use the space of literature to preserve the memory and ethos of the Paris

Commune in the early Third Republic. At heart, the problematic of this study has not

only to do with how normative representations of the marginalized circulate in the

literary text, but also with the possibility of challenging such representations that tend to

naturalize situations of domination and exclusion, or to subdue or silence (i.e., to render

in-fans) their violence. In sum, we shall be looking at normative utterances concerning

14
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, in The Marx-Engels Reader, R. Tucker,
ed. (New York : W.W. Norton and Co., 1978), pp. 95-6. I also reserve a particularly Ranciérian gloss on
democracy as being, in sum, any gesture (in action or speech) that breaks up, interrupts the consensual
“giveness” of naturalized situations of domination (i.e., organized according to a police logic of arkhès).
See the introduction to Disagreement, op. cit.
15
See for example, William Sewell Jr.’s Work and Revolution in France:The Language of Labor from the
Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Karl Marx’s analysis of the 1848
revolution remains to this day indispensable: La Lutte des classes en France, 1848 à 1850 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1994).
 11

the nature of difference that end up undermining themselves. These normative statements,

however, create a productive instability in representations of class, gender, and sexual

difference allowing for them to be re-negociated, and revealing something of the

utterances’/representations’ conditions of enunciation (i.e., from what position the “truth”

of its politics got elaborated); allowing them to be, if not to be openly resisted, than at

least strategically questioned under the rule of literature which gives “in principle the

power to say anything, to break free of the rules, to displace them”.16 In an important

respect, Jacques Derrida’s propositions on the ungovernable play of meaning recall

Rancière’s arguments concerning literarité,17 notably in its insistence on its potentially

free circulation and disponibilité, and its potential not only to open up the space of the

esthetic to what Foucault calls the vie infâmes (a point which we shall elaborate on in the

first chapter of this study), but also in its capacity to, as Ross Chambers puts it, change

desires themselves. 18 Indeed, for Rancière, like democracy, “literature” introduces

confusion into pre-determined identities, to the double extent that it is mimetic and can be

addressed to anyone – even those who should, say, be working rather than reading.19

Literature and democracy, then, have in common a principle of equality that can

potentially dislocate bodies from their “natural” functions and spaces.

Following these conceptual advances that interlock the esthetic and the political, I

will suggest that the “text” (be it a poem, a novel, a B.D., a film, or a treatise on

sexuality) constitutes a highly volatile medium for elaborating subject “truths” and for

inscribing the event of democracy. Indeed, perhaps the most commonly-identified

16
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, D. Attridge, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 37.
17
See especially, Jacques Rancière, La Chair des mots: politique de l’écriture (Paris: Galilée, 1998).
18
Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.1.
19
Ibid., Le partage du sensible (Paris : La Fabrique, 2000), p. 15.
 12

technique of modern narrative construction, the use of indirect free discourse, is such that

the language of those who are “voiceless” can at least potentially become that of “truth,”

undermining in the process the metaphysical chasm that separates the true from those

subjugated utterances that are defined as not being dans le vrai. 20 Sandy Petrey, for

instance, has convincingly demonstrated that precisely this species of egalitarian

circulation of speech torments Zola’s attempt to pin down the “truth” of the Parisian

working-class in L’Assomoir21 to the exact degree that Zola relies on the literary device

of indirect free discourse. As a result, even while the statements of the infans-demos are

being disqualified on the level of the histoire, the language (i.e., slang) of the subjugated

subjectivity enters into the space of the truth as articulated by the unfocalized narrator at

the level of the récit. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter four of the present work, this

narrative feature of modernity is exploited to such a degree in Jules Vallès’s Vingtras

trilogy that narrative and enuciative categories of authority and difference (e.g., the

difference between my speech and that of the other) themselves seem to totter

continuously on the edge of collapse.

In this work, I argue that there are at least three consistent tactics for representing

the infans/demos, and thus three esthetic tactics that Rimbaud and Vallès will engage

with separately or simultaneously in their respective genres: one is misérabilisme, or

20
See Michel Foucault, “L’ordre du discours,” in Philosophie, Anthologie (Paris : Gallimard, 2004), pp.
366-9. For Foucault, binary divisions of the type “true/false” need to be thought of as the mechanics of
systematic exclusion that inheres to the volonté de vérité, that accompany power and discourse and, ipso
facto, discourse as a strategic deployment of power. Such divisions are, on the level of their propositions,
neither “arbitrary, nor modifiable, nor institutional, nor violent.” From a genealogical perspective, however,
these “truths” appear as so many Nietzschean “texts” – that is, as “modifiable, institutionally constrictive,
historical systems.” (Ibid. My translation).
21
Sandy Petrey, “Nature, Society and the Discourse of Class,” A New History of French Literature, Denis
Hollier, et al., eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 774-780. We might add that a similar
enterprise of inscribing the “truth” of the working-classes (and in particular, the working-class, criminal
woman) is at the heart of the Goncourt’s novel Germinie Lacerteux. See, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
“Préface,” in Germinie Lacerteux (Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1875), pp. v-vii.
 13

bourgeois sentimental voyeurism. While it would be difficult to exhaust the category,

concept, or formal representations of the poor, especially children, or the poor qua

children, let us advance at least that the basic operation/message/effect of misérabilisme

is ideological. At base, it contributes to reproducing in the imaginary something of the

social fabric – i.e., the relations between classes, the dominant modes of production,

reproduction, subjectivation, etc.. We can therefore perceive the operations of this

discourse in the various, “popular” social inquiries à la Villermé or in the police

memoires of a Canler or a Peuchet produced in the 1840s-1850s.22 It is just as possible,

though, to locate the tropes and discourse of misérablisme in a generation of romantic

and post-romantic authors such as Victor Hugo (from whose Les Misérables the

discourse derives its name), the Goncourts, Alphonse Daudet, and Georges Sand. In

many of Hugo’s poems where the poor or working-classes are depicted, we tend to find

all the fundamental discursive techniques for figuring the infans that one can locate

consistently across discourses as varied as philanthropic inquiries, police reports,

journalistic accounts of crime and poverty in the faits divers rubrics of the newspapers

from mid-century on, romans feuilletons and, indeed, lyric poetry. Given this

representational and ideological coherence, how surprising is it that most of Hugo’s

voyeuristic poetic forays into how the “other-half” lives resemble so closely a home-

inspection by a welfare officer or a police perquisition, with the bourgeois poet/subject’s

wandering gaze penetrating (see especially, “Chose vue un jour de printemps”) with

absolute authority into the devastated and devastating domestic space of the poor (a

22
See for example Louis Villermé’s multi-volume study of hygiene, morals, and living conditions amongst
the working-classes (contextually coming hot on the heels of the 1830s, a decade which saw a nearly
constant radicalization amongst the proletariat in precisely the industries that Villermé was asked to study),
Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, laine, et soie
(Paris: Jules Renouard et Cie., 1840).
 14

phenomenon that becomes actualized at the end of the century with the publication of

guidebooks allowing bourgeois tourists of the emergent leisure class to “slum” on the

Parisian ramparts and in working-class neighborhoods)? 23

Misérabilisme, then, posits the Other as the silent, passive object of solicitation,

pathos, and knowledge. We might take misérabilisme as a discourse that in some sense

constitutes ideology itself; that is, it allows for identifications to take place on the

bedrock of irresolvable tensions between acts and intentions.24 In sum, it is a discursive

configuration allowing what Rancière would call a “wrong,” or “mis-count,” to appear as

effectively isolated from social structures and rapports; misérabilisme is affective rather

than critical, so that it can be appreciated by the readership of the bourgeoisie; thus it can

be discursively legible without appearing as a scandal, without pointing towards a

fundamental antagonism in social relations (however, this does not for as much prohibit

such scandals from being read in unpredictable ways by bourgeois readers, or indeed

subjects perhaps not meant to read them at all). Misérablisme thus allows for an affective

23
Indeed, a quick survey of representations of the poor from Hugo’s Contemplations, Châtiments, Feuilles
d’automne, and La Légende des siècles, tends to abound in so many figures of dead mothers, starving or
dead children, drunken fights that one is tempted to conclude that there are two kinds of poor in Hugo’s
poetry: the drunk and the dead. See, “Chose vue un jour de printemps,” “Melancholia,” “Intérieur,” “Le
Mendiant,” “À la mère de l’enfant mort,” and “Les Malheureux” in Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations
(Paris: Flammarion, 1998), pp. 121, 147-150, 244-5; “Souvenir de la nuit du quatre,” ibid., Les Châtiments
(Paris: Flammarion, 1998), pp. 108-10 ; see also in particular, “Les Pauvres gens,” “Fonction de l’enfant”
(“cette fragilité faite pour tout souffrir”), and “Question sociale,” ibid. La Légende des siècles, t. II (Paris:
Flammarion, 1967), pp. 301-7, 372-5; “Pour les pauvres” and the poem “L’Enfant,” which picks up on the
infans-demos motif via a displacement into the Turkish conquest of Greek revolutionaries in ibid., Les
Orientales et les Feuilles d’automne (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 101-2, 287-90. See also René Garguilo’s
excellent essay, “Un paternalisme littéraire : Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo et la littérature
prolétarienne,” Romantisme 39 (1983), pp. 61-72.
24
Paul Lafargue (who also took Hugo virulently to task in a chef d’oeuvre of méchanceté on the occasion
of the latter’s funeral) describes this basic contradiction (also known as hypocrisy) in an 1881 pamphlet
entitled Bourgeois Sentimentalism: “This is where hypocritical bourgeois sentimentality leads. Mr. Bright
the radical was one of those who most energetically opposed the law that limited the labor of women and
children to ten hours a day. And Mr. Bright, a pious man, goes to read the bible every Sunday with the
workers that he tortures and steals from in his factory six days of the week. If he kills them with work on
earth, he helps them to gain paradise in heaven.” Paul Lafargue, Bourgeois Sentimentalism,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1881/12/25.htm, last accessed 01/04/2011.
 15

discharge on the part of a bourgeois reader that symbolically resolves the contradictions

that separate his/her philanthropic sentiments from the raw violence of economic

exploitation that undergirds his socially and politically privileged postionality. But it

bears emphasizing that the critique of class violence inherent in misérablisme is informed

by all the contradictions of its social situation of enunciation. On closer inspection,

Hugo’s critique, which is that of misérabilisme in general, is nearly always a kind of

highly subjective, hysterical, impassive lamentation at the naturalized, agentless violence

at the heart of the order of things. (It is, in other words, a kind of archè-poetics.) As early

as the 1830s, when Hugo does take up, like many of his contemporaries, the question

sociale, it is not entirely in the mode of representing, in order to denounce economic and

political inequalities in terms that locate an overlapping or intersection of the political

and the economic. Rather, as the poem “Pour les pauvres” implies,25 the solution to the

thorny social question of economic misery and political conflict lays in a reconciliation of

all classes thanks to generous, paternalistic philanthropy on the part of the wealthy (see

the last four stanzas, with their anaphoric reprises of the imperative, isolated by an

emphatic puncteme, “donnez!”) – a voluntarism that guarantees, along with the eternal

salvation of the souls of the well-to-do, the stability of the status quo rather than its

meaningful transformation. Indeed, it strains the imagination (biased though it may be by

its situation in the present) to envision many members of the socio-political dominant

classes taking this ecumenical message seriously in the age of the incipient

industrialization of capital whose motto is summed up in Guizot’s decidedly liberal

boutade, enrichissez-vous! To the degree, however, that misérablisme generates an

25
Victor Hugo, op. cit., pp. 101-2.
 16

ontological and socio-political “truth”26 in both literature and disciplinary discourse in

nineteenth-century France, we shall find that it constitutes a privileged terrain for

subversion in the works of Rimbaud and Vallès, both of whom grapple with and, indeed,

humorously undermine the operations, legitimacy, and legibility of this infantilizing

discourse.

By way of illustrating the stakes of the discourse and the types of subversions or

détournements we might expect to find frequently in the authors we are mainly concerned

with here, I’d like to briefly consider two of Rimbaud’s earliest poems, “Les Étrennes des

orphelins” and “Les Éffarés”. Both deploy the figure of the child, and indeed inhabit the

essentially disciplinary discourse of misérabilisme to deeply disruptive ends that

demonstrate the capacity of reading and (re)writing to figure both the uninterrupted,

irresistible operations of power and effects of domination, and their total perversion and

reversibility at any possible moment of reading, re-reading, or writing.27 In both the “Les

Étrennes des orphelins” (one of the few poems Rimbaud published while he was alive

and up until recently considered a somewhat prosaic, if not mediocre, text)28 and “Les

Effarés” we have reifyingly misérabiliste representations of children. In the former we

find two children who are déclassés by the death of their parents and in the latter we have

a little band of five starving siblings watching a baker make bread in the early morning

26
I.e., that of the “lack” of the working-classes, their incapacity (which circularly justifies their insertion
into a disciplinary economy of institutions, their political marginalization, etc.) to adhere to bourgeois
norms of the body, economy, and sexuality.
27
“Les Etrennes des Orphelins” and “Les Effarés,” in Poésies Complètes (Paris : Librairie Générale
Française, 1998), pp. 47-50, 110-12
28
As usual with Rimbaud, we have Steve Murphy to thank for throwing a very productive wrench into the
hermeneutic machinery of the doxa that surrounded (and in many cases continues to do so) Rimbaud’s
early verse work. See his fascinating reading of “Les Étrennes des orphelins,” to which my own
understanding of the text, and the discursive practice of misérabilisme, is deeply indebted, in Le Premier
Rimbaud, ou l’apprentissage de la subversion (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991), pp. 25-38.
 17

hours in an anonymous French village. We would seem to be, for all intents and purposes,

in the very heart of hugoland, when it comes to these two texts.

However, what takes place in both poems is a sort of guerrilla warfare on the

entire discourse of misérabilisme – a kind of pillage of hypostatizing poetic tropes

masquerading as pastiche, a subversion of misérabilisme taking place on its own, highly

normative terms. The discourse of misérablisme, we’ll recall, depends for its

effectiveness on a complacent middle-class readership constituting itself through what

Roddy Reid calls “virtual witnessing” – that is, an imaginary voyeurism into how the

proverbial “other half” lives, typical of philanthropic literature that “encourag[es]

philanthropic impulses already stirring in beautiful souls.”29

Hence, when the ultimate disclosure of “Les Étrennes…” is that the abandonment

of the orphaned children is less metaphysical (i.e., the death of their parents) than

materially socio-economical, 30 an important disruption takes place in the virtual

community of voyeurs that displaces the scene of viewing from the naturalized stage of

the “family” to the political stage of class. In a similar vein, as “Les Éffarés” closes not

with some moralizing message about society’s obligation towards the less fortunate, but

with an almost slapstick image of children who “crèvent leur culotte” because they are

straining to catch a whiff of freshly baked bread they cannot afford to buy, something like

a destabilization of the ich-ideal of the bourgeoisie takes place. 31 The reader is

29
Roddy Reid, Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), p. 77.
30
Signified through the presence of ornate funeral wreaths paid for by the same bourgeois who then leave
two young orphans to their devices on a freezing winter’s night. See Steve Murphy, op. cit., pp. 48-9.
31
The orphans’ underwear wavering in the nocturnal wind is in an instance of what Bakhtin theorizes as
“uncrowning” – the ridicule of the situation makes taking the pretentious hypocrisy of misérablisme
seriously improbable to say the least. We’ll recall too that, for Bahktin, the plane of laugher is where that
which is not normally accessible for viewing (asses, anuses, ideology, etc.) “assumes special importance”.
See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Essays (Austin: University of Texas
 18

constrained by a disquieting confrontation with a social organization – its social

organization – that creates instances of unjustifiable injustice and poverty that it must

pass off as somehow naturally in the order of things. The bourgeois reader can no longer

unproblematically contemplate the scene of misery and take pleasure in his/her capacity

to feel pity for the “poor things”. The discursivity of the normal and the abnormal is in

the time and space of the poem revealed to a readership for whom no literary

échappatoire is provided and the poem momentarily renders inoperant the economy of

truth, normativity and power in the “useless”32 space of the poem.

A second discursive tactic, especially pronounced in the aftermath of political

upheavals such as in 1848, and 1871, consists in portraying working-class aspirations to

political equality as the irrational, destructive outburst of an essentially infantile subject

(“the child in need of a good spanking,” to quote Georges Sand in the aftermath of the

June days of 1848). The configuration at work here is that of the dangerous classes

scandalously insisting on their equality with the bourgeoisie. In this overwhelmingly

negative representation of the “other,” the demos, understood in a strongly negative sense,

displaces the infans as a discursive tactic for disqualifying urban working-class

Press, 2004), p. 23. Hannah Arendt is surprisingly Bakhtinian in her appraisal of the esthetico-political
stakes of laughter. For her, the moment a figure of “authority” evokes laughter, it has already lost its auratic
halo, leaving it increasingly in the position of relying on violence to conserve its “power”: “The greatest
enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” See Hannah
Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970), p. 45.
32
“Useless” or unproductive to the extent that the poem focuses less as an artifact of language on ensuring
communication between interlocutors and folds back onto itself, focusing on its own message. These
comments are obviously very far from being the last word on the poems in question. Indeed, a psycho-
analytic reading of “Les Éffarés” as displacement of the Oedipal drama is possible (and has no doubt
already been done), given the presence of the trous chauds (periphrasis for the oven) and the presence of
the baker roughly kneading his dough. Post-Freud (see his remarks on Polyander in Dreams), we might
surmise that behind such images lies a symbolic re-coding of the Mother (our aim, however, is not to
produce psycho-biographical studies of the authors in question).
 19

economico-political critiques and for proscribing revolutionary democratic politics. 33

This is especially the case for the literature of the decade or so following the Paris

Commune, instances of which we shall interrogate in the chapters below on the memory

of the Paris Commune in Rimbaud’s zutismes and in our closing chapter on the return of

the Commune today. The fact is that when we read Émile Zola, Maxime du Camp, and

Alphonse Daudet, one is struck by what, for lack of better epistemological vocabulary,

could be qualified as the biopolitical menace of the working-classes.34

Hence, the hypothesis that we will explore in chapters four and five consists in

arguing that, when a transition (as was symbolically the case in 1871) takes place in the

context of a democratic dislocation of a given partage du sensible– when something like

the infans shifts over to the demos in a moment of a radical demand for, or proclamation

of, equality – we’ll find a subsequent reaction to this phenomenon of disruption in the

textual accounts of the event, both for and against. I would be tempted to argue – though

this would require further room to explore than the already considerably lengthy present

study permits – that the specificity of representing the demos as a potential agent of racial,

hygienic and national apocalypse (as an agent undermining, if you will, the key co-

ordinates of biopower that are security, territory and populations) may reside in the

difference between disciplinary power and biopower. However, I am somewhat cautious

about making too sweeping a claim, for there are instances in which the infans and the

demos collapse into one another (just as, indeed, Foucault was apt to specify that

33
There is thus a double-sided aspect of the demos: on the one hand, it is (a) the “insult” used by Plato in
The Republic to describe those who have no right to be considered as the equals of their “betters,” but who
(b) nevertheless insist on this scandalous equality. It is possible, then, that the demos is both the subject of
politics for a Rimbaud or a Vallès, and the subject of anything but politics for their contemporaries who
looked upon the Commune with the horror of those who have heard the trumpet of Judgment Day.
34
See Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société: cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: Seuil, 1997);
See also Paul Lidsky’s comprehensive survey, Les Écrivains contre la Commune (Paris: La Découverte,
1999).
 20

discipline and biopower are not mutually exclusive technologies or epistemologies of

power). This is ultimately the significance, for example, of the character Jeanlin from

Zola’s Germinal. Both a child and a stand-in for the exploited working-classes, the

infans/demos, Jeanlin is a particularly odious little personage: he beats and sexually (and

economically) exploits his girlfriend, hoards food for himself in a subterranean cavern

while striking workers starve, and ultimately pounces on and slits the throat of a soldier

for no reason in particular, if not that of pure, destructive drive. 35 He is in many ways the

anti-gavroche, and it strikes one as not insignificant that such a representation of the

working-classes in the post-Commune period should both preserve the symbol of the

child as its chief metonym and so drastically transform its contours. Yet more

fundamentally, Jeanlin codifies the demos whose violence is, in keeping with the

scientific discourse of degeneration of the day, implicitly understood as innate, genetic.36

Jeanlin is for all intents and purposes a sort of devious Lumpenkinderproletariat,

representing the deviant element of the working-classes, but also their two-fold childish

and criminal nature – classes laborieuses, classes dangereuses, classes infantiles, as it

were. This same ambivalence, which is linked to the upheavals of democracy, of the

figure of the child can also be located in the (much more sympathetic, admittedly)

archetypical working-class infantile figure of Gavroche from Hugo’s Les Misérables, or

indeed, as we suggested earlier, in Michelet’s historical study, Le Peuple.

The third tactic, particularly relevant for any analysis of Rimbaud’s verse poetry

from 1870-71, is that of the depoliticization of art as such – an attempted withdrawal, or

at the least, distancing of art from the upheavals of history best exemplified in the

35
See Emile Zola, Germinal (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1983).
36
See, B.A. Morel’s Gobineau-influenced Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales
de l’espèce humaine, et des causes qui produisent ses variétés maladives (Paris: Baillière, 1857).
 21

Parnassian esthetic movement, about which we will have more to say in chapters one and

three.

I argue that the essentialism of misérabilisme, the pathologization of marginalized

subjectivities when they give voice to a Ranciérian “wrong” structuring the partage du

sensible, and the attempt to divorce the esthetic from the political constitute three,

fundamental discursive tactics at the heart of the infantilization of the “Other” in the

nineteenth-century. Our argument shall be that all three of these discursive tactics are

interrogated, troubled, and to some degree dismantled in Arthur Rimbaud’s earliest verse

work, and in Jules Vallès’s Trilogie Vingtras. Furthermore, in this work I underscore that

their complication of a certain truth regime (i.e., that of the bourgeoisie) creates and

disseminates normative propositions as to the “propriety” of the participation of the

infans in the sphere of the political. The works of Vallès and Rimbaud are thus esthetic

corollaries of the working-class uprising known as the Paris Commune. Throughout this

work, then, I show how both writers engage with, radicalize, and re-actualize a discourse

of opposition that was widespread at the end of the Second Empire, one that was critical

of political, class, gender, and sexual norms. The representations of the infans and the

demos that they interrogate and displace in their works are to be understood as

epistemological, political, and linguistic effects – i.e., the child is a kind of metonym for

the (working-class, gendered, sexual, colonized, etc.) “infantile” subject, and this

supposed ontological infancy is deployed to justify an inegalitarian partage du sensible.

The problem of the infans-demos is situated, then, on several levels. It is situated

on the level of the putative silence of the infantile subject; on the level of unspoken

power structures and ideology; on the level of a critique of capitalism and its effects on
 22

collectivities, identity, and the space-time of the body; on the level of memory.37 Finally,

these problems converge on the level of literary politics, compelling us to contemplate

how certain “hegemonic” forms of literature (i.e., the sonnet, the novel) can be

democratized in a way that gives visibility and audibility to the infans. Succinctly put, the

present work deals with class conflict, political subjectivation, democracy, and the

contest around memory in the early Third Republic and today.

Structure of the Present Work

In the opening chapter of this dissertation I examine the crucial role of the

common space of the cabaret in Second Empire France, arguing that it constituted a

privileged site where a speech of dissensus and a desire for democracy was enunciated

prior to – and indeed as a kind of precursor to – the Paris Commune. I historically

contextualize the role of the cabaret in the formation of class identity at the end of the

Second Empire in order to argue that Rimbaud democratizes the sonnet in a manner that

points both to the political, economic, and esthetic marginalization of certain

subjectivities, and to the paradoxical (democratic) heroics of every-day life in “Au

Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir”. In the second section of this chapter, the analysis

demonstrates how a single, feminine utterance in “Les Reparties de Nina” – a long,

counter-idyllic text – functions to deconstruct the masculinist tropes of lyrical poetry to

critical and hilarious ends that use laughter to neutralize the reifying tropes deployed to

represent the feminine in the Parnassian poetic movement. The laughter that erupts at the

end of this poem with Nina’s speech, “Et mon bureau?,” follows this esthetic critique

37
I.e., what happens when an event is silenced and how is this injunction to let an event lapse from
memory, to not speak of it, challenged?
 23

with an ideological one, crucially pointing to the economic and sexual exploitation and

the political marginalization of women in nineteenth-century France, while opening up a

space for a counter-economy of desire that is opposed to the hypostasizing tropes of

misérabilisme.

In the second chapter, the preliminary aim is to examine the corticality of the

child in the functioning of disciplinary power. I begin by analyzing Jacques-Louis

David’s painting from the age of the Terror in France (1793-4), La mort de Bara as an

exemplification of the tension between democracy and discipline; as an index of how the

infans gets constructed – how working-class speech and politics are co-opted, then

silenced altogether in the propagation of a mythic child who dies for the patrie. As a

pivot into a close reading of Rimbaud’s “Le Dormeur du val,” I remind the reader that

this figure of the puer novo returns in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war in the

context of the early Third Republic (i.e., portraits of Bara, notably by Weerts, adorn the

walls of schools). I compare the dissemination of this figure with the particularly strange

and edulcorated vision of the republican child in Fouillée’s Le tour de la France par deux

enfants. I use the term “strange” here to the extent that child vagabondage becomes the

sentimentalized occasion of the constitution of an imaginary identity, and edulcorated to

the extent that class, and indeed figures of the working-class, are entirely evacuated from

the narrative of the Nation – a strategically ideological effacement of class antagonisms

that is far from fortuitous in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. I argue that Rimbaud

advances in a similar direction in the “Le Dormeur du Val” (i.e., the central, radically

silent figure of this text can be read as a figure of universality, and indeed initially

presents itself as a kind of inscription of the pro patria mori). While acknowledging the
 24

validity of such a reading, however, my claim is that Rimbaud constitutively undermines

both the esthetic hegemony of the alexandrine, the structural legibility of the sonnet in a

manner that troubles the sectarian discourse of nationalism through a dislocation of

speech and the deployment of a rhetoric of silences (e.g., litotes, euphemisms, and

periphrasis) which the chapter examines in detail, notably through the lens of

psychoanalytic theories of “trauma,” from Freud to LaCapra.

In chapter three, we shall move historically to the aftermath of the Paris

Commune, at precisely the moment when Vallès is exiled in London and Rimbaud comes

to Paris. At this moment in French history, society, and literature, it was deeply taboo,

and in some specific instances illegal, to evoke the memory of the recent civil war. Thus,

the central problematic of this chapter deals with the violence of silence, and the ethics

and politics of re-constituting a form of community that seeks to preserve from oblivion

both the memory, the politics, and the ideals of the Paris Commune, and to prolong, in

the circle of writers, the political ideals of the “lost community”. Indeed, the initial

question that I address in this chapter is: how does the constitution of a “writerly

community” problematize and indeed undermine the then-dominant regime of

“propriety” and (literary) “property” in a distinctly Communard fashion. Such a

“contingent community” does so, I demonstrate, by writing-together, by writing

parodically (i.e., by undermining the very notion of a “proper”, or of the original through

its very citation in a different context, or in the context of difference); it does so by using

the esthetic (i.e., poetry) as a mode of political resistance to the violence of “forgetting”

the Commune. I close this chapter with a reading of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s “Sonnet du

trou du cul” that proposes to see in this collaborative text a truly revolutionary act of
 25

parody and homotextuality that gives a striking form and articulation to the so-called

“love that dare not speak its name”. Here, we address the following questions: what to

make of a text with two authors? What are the meaning and the politics of the parodic

gesture? How do these two poets manage to give a beautifully erotic voice to love

between men; how do they create a productive counter-economy of homoerotic practices

and unstable identity that challenge the reifying and stigmatizing (I enlist the disciplinary

discourses of medicine and the police, from Carlier, Canler, and Tardieu to make this

point) heteronormative sexual categories of the nineteenth century?

In the final chapter of this dissertation, we shall switch authors and genres, with a

focus on Jules Vallès’s Vingtras trilogy (with a slight emphasis on the first and final

novels of the trilogy, so as to better put into relief Vallès’s conceptual and esthetic linking

of the fate of the “child” to that of the “people”). In this chapter, I argue that the only

other author from the same period to go as far as Rimbaud in his critique of disciplinary

norms of class was Jules Vallès. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jules Vallès continues to

pose a problem with respect to the literary canon and within the politics of remembering

the Third Republic. Figuratively speaking, Vallès’s trilogy is a kind of anti-

bildungsroman, tracing the arc of Jacques Vingtras’s political subjectivation across three

novels, L’Enfant, Le Bachelier, and L’Insurgé. Though our focus will be on the first book,

we will weave in and out of the other two to trace Vallès’s movement from infans to

demos. Starting from L’Enfant, I explore the ways in which Vallès proposes an anti-

essentialist, slippery and ironic model of writing that critiques bourgeois norms of the

family, and affirms the equality of the child with the adult, or, metonymically, of the

proletarian with the bourgeois. Vallésian irony, I argue, is conceptually and politically
 26

proximate to Rimbaud’s use of parody in the Album zutique. I close this chapter by

focusing on the trope of the devenir-autre, a figure linking, along with the interrogation

of authority and identity, the first book of the trilogy to the last, or l’enfant to le peuple.

We conclude this dissertation, finally, with an epilogue that proposes, as a gesture

towards future projects and research, an analysis of the para-literary, and one might say

“democratic,” narratives that Vallès’s work, and indeed the Paris Commune qua

contested historical narrative, have inspired. Namely, we will be engaging with Peter

Watkins’ docu-fiction and Jacques Tardi’s best-selling B.D. In this concluding section,

we shall advance the argument that the “return of the Commune” today as a potential

model for collective agency and subjectivation is far from historically, esthetically, or

politically fortuitous: indeed, in an era when political power and economic resources

have never been more concentrated than at the end of the nineteenth-century, the works

of Rimbaud and Vallès, and the event of the Commune, continue to solicit our desire for

a different kind of politics, one that gives an audible voice to the “silent” demos.
 27

1
In Democracy’s Green Cabaret

Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir

Depuis huit jours, j'avais déchiré mes bottines

Aux cailloux des chemins. J'entrais à Charleroi.
 Au Cabaret-Vert : je demandai des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fût à moitié froid.

Bienheureux, j'allongeai les jambes sous la table

Verte : je contemplai les sujets très naïfs
De la tapisserie.  Et ce fut adorable,
Quand la fille aux tétons énormes, aux yeux vifs,

 Celle-là, ce n'est pas un baiser qui l'épeure ! 

Rieuse, m'apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiède, dans un plat colorié,

Du jambon rose et blanc parfumé d'une gousse

D'ail,  et m'emplit la chope immense, avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriéré.1

In this chapter I want to take up two texts: “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir”

and “Les Reparties de Nina”. Generally, “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir” is read in

relation to a text that is thematically and poetically very similar, if carrying a more

explicit erotic charge, namely, “La Maline”. However, I would like to argue that if we

were to challenge ourselves to find an infratext that accomplishes the same order of

critical and esthetic subversions as “Au Cabaret-vert,” we might find it in a quite

surprising poem entitled “Les Reparties de Nina”.2 Indeed, both poems comport a meta-

poetic and polemical dimension that upends the Romantic discourse of the idyll as well as

1
Arthur Rimbaud, “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir,” in Oeuvres complètes, André Guyaux, éd. (Paris:
Gallimard, 2009), pp., 111.
2
I would like to signal the following analyses of this poem over the past 30 years as being particularly
important: Jean-Pierre Bobillot, “Vaches, mouches, figures: Les reparties de Nina, Chanson de la plus haute
tour, Chanson de la plus haute tour” in Parade Sauvage 14 (May 1999); Jean-Pierre Chambon, “Quelques
problèmes de vocabulaire,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes: Arthur Rimbaud 4 (1980); Dominique Combe,
“De l’idylle au vaudeville: Les Reparties de Nina,” in Lectures des Poésies et d’Une saison en enfer de
Rimbaud, S. Murphy, ed. (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009) Jean-François Laurent,
“Reparties en pointillés: d’un manuscrit à l’autre, ou les implications d’un pluriel,” Parade Sauvage 3
(1986). My thanks to Seth Whidden and Steve Murphy for these references.
 28

the Parnassian pulling away from the present, satirizing on the one hand its irreflexive

naïveté (outmoded, to say the least, at the time of the année terrible) and its

representations that reinforce the symbolic silencing of the infans. On the other hand, it

preserves and insists on the radically utopic dimension of poetic form of the idyll. By

way of a brief rehearsal, we’ll recall that traditionally an idyll is a short poem taking

place in a bucolic setting and having love for its subject. In both these texts, then, we

have an anti-idyll; or rather, a désoeuvrement of the idyll, a turning of the idyll as form,

and in extenso of poetry, into a form of (critical, subversive) idleness. Indeed, “Au

Cabaret-vert” opens up as a kind of turning-on-its head of the romantic idyll. Take for

instance the presence of the city in both poems. Though not strictly interdicted in idyllic

discourse, urban settings are nevertheless traditionally evoked in the idylls’ incipit as a

kind of framing device for the amours champêtres to come. Here, although perhaps this is

more the case for “Cabaret,” we have rather the exact opposite (i.e., nature framing the

entrance into a bar in the Belgian city of Charleroi), putting the poem on a kind of

parodic or polemical footing that can be found in the earlier poem “Les Reparties de

Nina,” a text which perambulates between both a utopic urban setting of community and

an erotic, parodic natural space which is anything but an unsullied preserve of natural

innocence.

I chose the following poems, “Les Reparties de Nina” and “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq

heures du soir,” for two reasons: first, they seemed particularly noteworthy to the extent

that “nothing” takes place in them; second, I am interested in trying to theorize what

some important critics have called the “failure” in these poems.3 Rather than a failure that

3
Cf., Yves Bonnefoy, “Rimbaud: ‘Les reparties de Nina’,” in Le Lieu et la formule: Hommage à Marc
Eigeldinger (Neuchatel: La Baconnière-Payot, 1979), p. 88 ; John Huston, The Design of Rimbaud’s Poetry
 29

is semantically or formally inherent to these poems, the failure in question is rather a

staged one: it is the deliberate mise en scène of the failure of a kind of poetic form and

discourse. What if, furthermore, the interest of the banal, of the quotidian, of the rien

constituted, when placed at the heart of lyrical poetry, a veritable event that effectively

manages to democratize the esthetic space of poetry? What if folding the everyday into

the space of ‘high art’ managed to undo, if ever so provisionally, what Jacques Rancière

refers to as the age-old law of lexis by laying claim, through the impropriety of

statements made out of their normative enunciative context, their discursive

inappropriateness, to a radical form of equality, and to a right not only to be heard, but to

be heard in poetry, in philosophy, or in politics?4 In the following pages, one of our

principal claims shall be that the interruption of the quotidian, of everyday speech and of

the demos into the lyric, this an-archic, “improper” mixing of registers is revolutionary in

precisely the sense that Maurice Blanchot circumscribes in his Everyday Speech: the

everyday posits as the propre of the subject a fundamental impropriety,5 and it opens the

everyday, the unremarkable, the an-historic into the domain of history, making of it thus

an idea of utopia (a strange utopia, without inauguration or telos) allowing the

(non)subject to escape the hold that structures of domination and regimes of truth have on

it.

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 25-7 ; Robert G. Cohn, The Poetry of Rimbaud
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 74-6; see also Jean-Pierre Chambon, art. cit., p
100.
4
Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 27. In this (relatively) earlier work, Rancière refers to this law as one of
adequation between genre and statements: this is “what Plato names lexis: the modality of the poem’s
enunciation, of the relation between its subject and what it represents”. For now, it suffices to point out that
this problematic is a recurrent one in Rancière’s thought, and that along its conceptual trajectory Rancière
variously refers to it as le tort, la part des sans-part, le partage du sensible and consensus.
5
Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” in The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 238: it “is, then, ourselves, ordinarily. At this first stage, let us
consider the everyday as without a truth proper to it.”
 30

As Blanchot notes, the everyday is in some sense radically democratic, a lieu vide

forcing me to consider myself as an other and the other as self – “it is without subject

[…]; it is any man, anyone at all […]; and this anyone, properly speaking, is neither me

nor, properly, the other.”6

It is, then, literally in the place of the everyday that “nothing happens,” that

nothing takes place. However it is precisely this “nothing” that, in Blanchot’s eloquent

reading, constitutes the “essential” event of our shared, incommensurable humanity. To

the extent that it suspends or neutralizes the question of “what we are,” the everyday, and

the “rien” which is its principle, diffuses claims to truth of socio-symbolic determinations

(whether we conceive of them in terms of class, consensus, etc.) into a series of “human

possibilities” in a shared space of everyday being-together. It is therefore a kind of

unexpected utopia that is clearly staged in Rimbaud’s “Les Reparties de Nina” and “Au

Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir”. Both of these poems, in their way, grapple with and

subvert the predominant esthetics and politics of lyric expression and representation in

order to inscribe at the heart of the lyric the difference of its margins; both poems indeed

displace the center-margin dichotomy through the insistence on the democratic potential

of (in-)common language to make other modes of representation, the emergence of other

subjectivities. However, before turning to these texts proper, I feel that a brief word on

their operations of subversion (what are they and how are they pertinent) and, logically,

their literary context may be necessary.

I. Situating the Texts

6
Ibid., pp. 239, 244-5.
 31

“Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir” is decidedly one of the more “Ardennais”

poems that Rimbaud wrote. It is a text that reminds us that, unlike most of the authors in

the French canon, Rimbaud was not a Parisian poet (even if he dreamed, as he wrote to

Paul Demeny in August of 1871, of working “libre, à Paris, que j’aime.”). For a number

of philological reasons,7 dating Rimbaud’s poems is always a slightly complex endeavor,

and ultimately one wonders to what extent it’s even necessary to get a precise sense of

which texts were written when. For the purposes of this study, however, I claim that the

period, if not exactly the date, in which these texts were written constitutes a highly

significant detail for two interdependent reasons: on the one hand, while it is something

of a commonplace in critical assessments of the Rimbaldian oeuvre to accept that

Rimbaud’s posture towards the French poetic cannon is a profoundly subversive, if not

revolutionary one, the trend is, often implicitly, sometimes explicitly (as is the case with

Jacques Roubaud and Éric Marty, for example),8 to situate this subversive posture in the

aftermath of the Semaine sanglante.

To put it in terms of the schema I seek to interrogate here, there is a kind of

transformation in the very ontology of Rimbaud’s poetic work, passing from technically

servile pastiches of de Banville, Hugo, Coppée and other Parnasso-Romantics, to an

upheaval in which the traditional forms of French poetry are dealt a death-knell that

signals, in a kind of ex post facto rectilinearization of the poet’s esthetic development,

Rimbaud’s transition from verse to prose poems, the latter of which are usually the only

7
For example, Rimbaud often dated his early verse poems to reflect some symbolically important date,
such as that of 4 September, which he ascribed to the revolutionary poem “Le Forgeron,” or the date of 14
July, 1871 which he attributes to his devastatingly sarcastic, metapoetic critique of the Parnassian esthetic,
“Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos des fleurs,” or “Paris se repeuple”. This is to say nothing of the fact that a
good number of the texts from late 1871-1872 were later re-transcribed from memory by Verlaine.
8
Jacques Roubaud, La Vieillesse d’Alexandre: essai sur quelques états récents du vers français (Paris:
Maspero, 1978) ; Éric Marty, “Rimbaud et l’adieu au politique,” Cahiers de littérature francaise, II, André
Guyaux, ed. (Oct. 2005), pp. 63-79.
 32

ones given any serious consideration as important contributions to French literature.9 My

aim is to question what stakes are at play when we discuss the notion of “subversion”.

Are we dealing with a case of transgression, a critical gesture that is ultimately

unsuccessful because it is too tightly, dialectically determined by the object of

transgression? We’ll recall that Michel Foucault eventually abandons this entire notion of

transgression, settling on a more theoretically consistent and sophisticated account of

power in terms of normative strategies. For Foucault, the acute disappointment of any

theory of power based on transgression is that, on the one hand it presupposes power to

be a monolithic, clearly identifiable and located “possession”; second, “transgression”

does nothing to make “power” tremble, rather it merely pushes back the horizon of its

operations in order to reconfirm its authority later on.10 We’re here in the domain of the

well-known paradox of “blasphemy”: that is, the transgression is only effective if the one

doing the blaspheming really does believe in the sanctity of the object/rule being

transgressed, and thus only manages to unconsciously confirm its transcendent power.

It is necessary, however, to grapple as much with the concepts of transgression

and subversion as with their specific instances in the early verse work of Rimbaud. To do

so is required precisely because there exists a kind of weak, decontextualized and

submerged consensus that Rimbaud’s poems in verse are, at the very least on a formal

poetic level, transgressive, and that it suffices to point this out to pass on to a discussion

of the significance of the later corpus of poems in prose.

Indeed, accounts for these transgressions of poetic norms, especially in the

alexandrine, tend to oscillate between two poles. On one end of the spectrum, they are

9
The main exceptions to this trend are “Le Bateau ivre” and, to a certain degree, “Le Dormeur du Val”.
10
See Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” Dits et Écrits I : 1954-1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001),
pp. 261-78.
 33

attributed to youthful negligence (cf., supra n.3), and on the other end, they are read as

deliberate esthetic provocations (this is especially the case for Steve Murphy). While

clearly situating myself within the latter heuristic, I seek here to reposition these various

formal pied-de-nez within a context that sees the esthetic insurgency that Rimbaud

undertakes (and this, I would argue, from the very first texts in verse that we have) in his

verse work specifically and often deliberately as symbolic acts of political provocation

allowing us to locate in the gesture of subversion the emergence of an oppositional

posture (hence the versus in subvertere) where none was anticipated by the given order of

political, historic, and esthetic things. Against the circularly reductive readings of

Rimbaud as an oracular poet a century ahead of his time, I argue that in the problems

raised by his stance towards verse poetry we get a sense of the extent to which he may

have been, in 1870-71, only slightly ahead of the events of his day. In sum, Rimbaud is

very much a poet of the Commune, engaged with the problematics of equality, of

democracy, of violence and of mourning. Hence, I seek to reveal and interrogate, as

Fredric Jameson suggests,11 the subversions of form as a kind of semantic content in its

own right – one which frequently works to intensify, elaborate, and comment upon the

ostensible subject of the poems themselves.

In Rimbaud’s early verse, structural symbolic arrangements such as the

alexandrine, the sonnet, the octosyllabe (as in “Les Reparties”), and questions of registers

of language, are dynamic cultural and historical forms of generating meanings and truth-

effects. In Rimbaud’s early verse work, these forms exist in a tense contest over their

very meaning. In this tension, Rimbaud forces them to adopt an oppositional posture with

11
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1981), cf. especially pp. 86-102.
 34

respect to the dominant class and esthetic norms of the era, and opens them up as

democratic, dialogical spaces from which may emerge what I call the “voice” of the

infans, and in which new configurations of the partage du sensible can be imagined and

enacted. The texts that I propose we look at in the following pages are both social and

symbolic acts of language that manage to “rewrite (…) hegemonic forms themselves” 12

and transform these poetic forms into a sign-system for expressing the profound social

and political antagonisms which resulted in a political uprising and, eventually, a civil

war in which both Rimbaud and Vallès were implicated, each in their own way. The

subversion at hand, in other words, resides not only in a formal upending of poetic

tradition, but also, in a related way, in a dynamic interplay of power and resistance: it is a

crucial act of symbolically slipping into a field, or in this case authoritative “text” (e.g.,

the alexandrine, the sonnet, etc.), of power in order to generate strategies for challenging

or even upending it. A literary politics of subversion lets surface in the space of poetry –

as Vallès does in his journalism and prose – a kind of silence that transforms into an

expression of something like the “impossible” element of bourgeois society. By

impossibility, we are referring to that aporetic element of any ideological system which

its own discourse cannot take into account without irremediably shaking its very

epistemological and ontological foundations. This “impossible” element is what

Rancière, coming closest to aligning himself with a current of thinking in Marx that he

has elsewhere been critical of, variously refers to as the demos, the mécompte, and as the

sans-part. In his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx

sees in the proletariat the convergence of both the universal and the singular to the degree

that, lacking any positive order of rights, the proletariat comes to stand for the human
12
Ibid., p. 86.
 35

condition at its most basic. It is this same proletariat that Rancière takes as the name of

political subjectivization as such when he sees in this act the claiming of an “impossible”

name for the subject. Marx and Rancière’s proletariat (or “sans-part”) is simultaneously a

silent and existentially crucial element in a social order that, in and of itself, points to the

existing order’s internal contradictions. As Marx states: “A class must be formed which

has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class

which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character

because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress

because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong, but wrong in general.”13

In Rimbaud, the “impossible” element we shall encounter emerges from several,

co-extensive levels – here, an ideological subversion of patriarchy (“Les Reparties de

Nina”), there the heteroglossic voice of the demos (“Au Cabaret-vert…”); here a

powerful critique of the funereal topos of nationalism (“Le Dormeur du Val”), and there

the devastatingly silenced “voice” of the Paris Commune (“Paris”). The red-thread, so to

speak, running through these works is their imaginary commitment to and symbolic

engagement with the politics of the Paris Commune, whose ideals they in many ways

manage to radically surpass and whose very existence and memory surfaces as a kind of

defiant writing, as we shall later see in the third chapter of this work.

Without seeking to evacuate from the verse poems their historical, imaginary and

political context, my aim is to demonstrate that a two-fold enterprise of poetic and

political subversion, a radical conjunction of esthetic and political revolution (of

13
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Marx and Engels: Selected
Works (London: 1969), p. 219, quoted in Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 165-6. See also, Alain Badiou’s “Logic of the Site,” Diacritics 33:3-4
(Fall-Winter, 2003), pp. 140-51.
 36

changing the world through changing its interpretation, to paraphrase Marx) that critics

have astutely identified in Rimbaud’s work is not somehow monocausally determined by

the uprising and subsequent crushing of the Paris Commune. To the contrary, this

enterprise is present not only very early on, but from the very beginning – that is, from

the summer of 1870, as a kind of inscription of the tumultuous upheavals and

revolutionary hopes for transforming society that were a part of a larger socio-discursive

context in France at the end of the Second Empire.

Before turning to a close analysis of our texts, let us attempt to address two issues

of contextual importance. First, we shall briefly rehearse what the formal, poetic

conventions of the era demanded of any aspiring poet, in order to better situate these texts

within, and ultimately distinguish them from, the literary context of the Parnassian

“school” of poetry. Second, we will have to comment upon a detail that has, curiously,

gone somewhat unremarked upon in the body of scholarship surrounding “Au Cabaret-

vert,” namely, the fact that it takes place in a cabaret.

A brief word, then, on this literary context and its connection to the theory of

subversion proposed above. When discussing the Parnassians, I believe it is both prudent

and appropriate to suspend the appellation “school” through the use of quotation marks.

This is so to the extent that no consensus exists as to where or not we can to construct a

monolithic category (i.e., a “school”) around such a disparate poetic movement which, at

one time, included poets such as Verlaine and Mallarmé amongst its epigones.14 Both

Gretchen Schultz and Seth Whidden, for example, have interrogated the Parnassian

“school” from the standpoint of literary genealogies and have concluded that it is

extremely difficult to ascertain whether or not Parnassus should be understood as “a

14
In this respect, I follow the analyses of Gretchen Schultz, Seth Whidden, Steve Murphy, and others.
 37

continuation of Romanticism or as a reaction to it,” or indeed both. For Whidden, in fact,

the Parnassian movement is arguably best understood as both a continuation and mutation

(but with distinctly stark ideological differences, a point which he perhaps does not

exploit to his advantage) of the Romantic movement. Indeed, in his analysis, the

Parnassian movement is the dominant poetic movement in French letters from mid-

century up until the very end of the nineteenth century.15 Now, though Schultz is of

course right to underscore the “formalist” rigor, and anti-romantic “impassibilité” of the

“Parnassian school,” we really ought to recall, along with Whidden and certainly in the

wake of Steve Murphy’s interventions into the question, the sheer heterogeneity of poetry

in the 1850s and 1860s, and the lack of any clear, formally delimited “movement,” even

if it was “predominant”. The first issue of Le Parnasse Contemporain (1866) contained

poems by formal purists such as Leconte de Lisle (who had ten poems published in it)

and Catulle Mendès. But it also contained important poems by Charles Baudelaire (who

published a whopping 16 poems in the journal’s inaugural issue) and, of course, Paul

Verlaine – a poet whom neither his contemporaries nor critics today would accuse of

being a formal hardliner. Indeed, one rather infamous césure enjambante from Verlaine’s

“Dans la grotte” placed the sememe “épouvantable” at the 6-7 frontier of the caesura

(thus creating the rather charming, if retrospectively unfortunate, potential calembour,

l’époux vantable, or the “laudable husband”). It struck Rimbaud as particularly

illustrative of what he understood by “modern poetics,” perhaps leading him indeed to

15
See especially Whidden’s introduction to his study of lyrical subjectivity in Rimbaud and Verlaine in
Leavining Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud (Amsterdam and New York: Faux Titre,
2007), pp. 17-45; See also, Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in
Nineteenth-Century Lyric Poetry (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1999), p. 84; cf., Yann
Mortrelette’s preface to his edition, Le Parnasse (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne), pp. 8-39;
and Laurence Campa, Parnasse, Symbolisme, Esprit nouveau (Paris: Ellipses, 1998).
 38

classify Verlaine as a “vrai poète” amongst the most modern of what he calls the

“deuxièmes romantiques (…) très voyants” in his famous letter to Paul Demeny.16

It is thus essential to draw a distinction – one that is not a sclerotic binary,

however – between at least two, at times divergent, at times convergent, currents of

Parnassian poetics: on the one hand, there is the authoritative hard-line and rigorous

formalism of post-48, Second Empire political disassociation with which it would not be

inappropriate to associate Leconte de Lisle or a Gautier; on the other hand, we find the

funambulism and rhythmic innovation of de Banville, and the rhythmico-metrical and

rhyme experimentation of a Verlaine (to say nothing of Baudelaire or Mallarmé, who was

excluded from the third and final issue of Le Parnasse because the obscure poetry was

seen as politically dangerous).17 In other words, on a fundamental level, our argument

may be said to reflect the fact that, to borrow Raymond Williams’s lexicon, Rimbaud is

actually very much a poet of his time, which of course makes him a “modern” poet.18

16
Arthur Rimbaud, “Lettre à G. Izambard du 25 août, 1870” and “ Lettre à Paul Demeny du 15 mai, 1871,”
O.C., op. cit., pp. 332, 343. See also, Paul Verlaine, Les Fêtes galantes, La Bonne Chanson, Romances sans
paroles, Écrits sur Rimbaud (Paris : Flammarion, 1976), p. 35. As Jean-Michel Gouvard points out in his
study of the history of versification, the césure enjambante began to appear in lyrical poetry by fits and
starts in the mid-1800s. He dates its return, and thus the beginning of important esthetic resistance to the
norms of traditional versification, as being ten years prior to the first poems by Rimbaud, in a poem by
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam written in 1859. Jean-Michel Gouvard, La Versification (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1999), p. 124. For Murphy, the fact that Rimbaud qualifies the Parnassians as
second-wave romantics is revealing in its suggestion that the perceived rupture between romanticism and
Parnassus was not so total as it may appear to us today. Cf., Steve Murphy, “Versifications
‘parnassiennes’ ?,” Romantisme 140 (2008), pp. 67-84.
17
See, Benoît de Cornulier, “Pour une approche de la poésie métrique au XIXe siècle,” Romantisme 140
(2008), pp. 42-3 ; Steve Murphy, art. cit. On Verlaine’s “ loose ” versification, see G. Schultz, op. cit. ;
Steve Murphy, “Verlaine Parnassien,” in Lectures de Verlaine: Poèmes Saturniens, Fêtes galantes,
Romances sans paroles, Steve Murphy, ed. (Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes 2007), pp. 7-19 ;
Benoit de Cornulier, “La Pensée rythmique de Verlaine,” Europe 936 (Avril 2007), pp. 87-96 ; Ibid.,
Théorie du vers: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé (Paris: Le Seuil, 1982) ; and on the context of the
publication of de Banville’s treatise on poetry, Jacques Bienvenu, “Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos des
rimes,” Vies et poétiques de Rimbaud: Parade Sauvage, Colloque 5 (Charleville-Mézières: Bibliothèque-
Musée Rimbaud, 2005), pp. 247-72.
18
See Shoshana Felman’s gloss on the word “modern” in her “Tu as bien fait de partir, Arthur Rimbaud:
poésie et modernité,” Littérature 11 (Oct. 1973), p. 5: “moderne: (…) qui est de son temps, (…) [q]ui est
du temps de celui qui parle”.
 39

That is, like poetry itself at the end of the Second Empire, his own verse work is caught

somewhere in the dialectical play between resistance and hegemony, between the residual

and the emergent. As Williams puts it, a “residual cultural element is usually at some

distance from the effective dominant.” With the concept of the residual, we come quite

close to seizing the kinds of internal contradictions and heterogeneity of the Parnassian

“school,” itself somewhere in the midst of the dominant and the residual. “But,” Williams

goes on to state, “some part of it, some version of it (…) will in most cases have had to be

incorporated if the effective dominant culture is to make sense in these areas. (…) By

‘emergent’, I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships

and kinds of relationships are continually being created.” 19

Rimbaud’s early verse work, and in particular the works we are interested in

reading, may be said to be residual in the sense that it inherits and interrogates a set of

features from the dominant poetic discourses and systems that, even if they share certain

ideological and esthetic traits, are not reducible to these features as such. In other words,

on a purely esthetic level, it is difficult, if not fruitless, to draw stark, essential divisions

between Rimbaud and his contemporaries on the level of esthetic innovation or indeed

structural upheavals (to gloss Marx we might say that men make their poetry, but, to the

extent that art may be seen as a relay of ideology, they do not perhaps do so entirely as

they please). As with many of his contemporaries, if at times more consciously,

Rimbaud’s texts give formal visibility to a series of symbolic and political conflicts and

structures that were predominant in French poetry and society at the end of the Second

Empire, if not in the nineteenth century. That being stated, Rimbaud’s work nevertheless

19
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.
123. My emphasis.
 40

does manage to radicalize disruptions and fissures within these esthetic, ideological, and

political structures to a degree that is unusual amongst his peers, making them something

like a stylistic griffe of the early work. Indeed, Rimbaud takes up these innovations and

upheavals (i.e., the structurally discordant use of enjambment, the destabilization of the

caesura, the use of non-canonical forms such as the sonnet libertin) from poets, like

Verlaine, Baudelaire and de Banville, and ups their ante, as it were. What further

distinguishes him from his contemporaries, however, is his interrogation of poetry’s

social, political, and historical role. In sum, what perhaps renders Rimbaud’s work truly

revolutionary is its persistent insistence on poetry’s relationship to political, social, and

historical phenomena.20 The political subtext of his poetic production in 1870-1871 traces

for us the very moments of political subjectivation, the creation of “new meanings and

relationships” that, in aggregate, or condensed together with the historical and

intertextual context of the année terrible allow us to deduce something like the

emergence of the political “Event” of the Paris Commune. Taken in a two-fold political

and theoretical sense of the term, the Commune may be thought of as an “Event” if we

understand by that term the taking place of a disruption that should have been, stricto

sensu, structurally impossible within a given, rational socio-political arrangement.21 What

the emergence of an “Event” accomplishes, then, is not only, or merely, a signposting of

the violence and silences upon which a given hierarchical partage du sensible is

20
In a sense, this too situates Rimbaud within the field of Romanticism’s sense of the social vocation of
poetry with the following crucial distinction: the absence of poetic (or disciplinary, to borrow a
Foucauldian term) paternalism with respect to the peuple that one can find pervasively in the works of a
Lamartine, a Hugo, a Sand, and indeed within the vast field of pre-1848 disciplinary discourse on the
working classes, from the social inquiries of Louis Blanc and Sisimond de Sismondi to Frégier’s study of
the classes dangereuses of Paris. See, for instance, René Garguilo, “Un Paternalisme littéraire:
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo et la literature prolétarienne,” Romantisme 39 (1983), pp. 61-72.
21
Cf., Slavoj Žižek’s exegesis of Badiou’s theory of the “Event” in his Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre
of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 130-2.
 41

predicated. More radically still, it changes the very epistemological, imaginary, and

practical parameters of the possible itself. It suspends the immanent logic of the present,

undermining its appearance of seamless, grounded immutability, and simultaneously

shifts our perspective on the past and the future. In poems such as “Au Cabaret-vert” and

“Les Reparties de Nina,” we must be attentive to traces of an event that, at the time of

writing, were still to come for the poet, that were still “à-venir” rather than situated in “le

futur”.

Thus, although the Parnassian literary movement was far from monolithic, and

indeed maintaining a grasp on, or even locating, the temporal brackets of the “school” is

a complex task, it is nonetheless possible to identify some of its pertinent, ideologico-

esthetic traits in at least one version of Parnassian esthetics and politics with which

Rimbaud was certainly engaged, and thus to better situate and apprehend the subversive

scope of Rimbaud’s early verse. First and foremost amongst these would be what is

conventionally understood as the Parnassian “turning back” to the model of antiquity and

to poetic tropes (especially notable is its rehabilitation of complex rhyme structures, such

as rime battelée, annexée, etc.) that had been démodé since the Renaissance. Whidden

argues that this neo-classical turning-back to the past needs to be understood, perhaps

first and foremost, as a turning-away from the present – that is, as a repudiation of the

Romantic notion of the social utility of poetry. This esthetic revolution is undoubtedly

best understood as a kind of reaction formation – as the traumatic, melancholic

inscription of the failed 1848 political revolution and the subsequent coup d’état.22

22
This is, after all, Ross Chambers’s brilliantly demonstrated thesis in The Writing of Melancholy – i.e.,
that the “depolitification” of Baudelaire, Flaubert, etc. had to do with a deeply felt sense of humiliation,
betrayal, disillusion, and loss in the aftermath of the June 1848 uprising. For such a generation of artists,
memory itself became synonymous with lack, less an anchor for identity than a heavy fog in which one’s
 42

Indeed, in his work on Walter Benjamin, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton invites us to

consider such artistic movements that seek to “regress to [a mythic] past” where one may

supposedly locate a reassuring imaginary esthetic or political “object” as attempts to

escape the traumatic encounter with the loss, if not lack, that characterizes the symbolic

order. Parnassus may thus be read as an attempted flight away from the violence of

history and revolution to the empty, homogeneously repetitive temporality of the

“auratic,” or, in Benjamin’s analysis of nineteenth century capitalism, the commodity

fetish. The irony in l’art pour l’art’s flight away from the present resides, then, in the

perfect recreation of the thing one supposes it is most likely attempting to eschew,

namely, the commodity itself, or a commoditized form of poetry addressing itself, like an

advertisement, to a special, (s)elect kind of reader/consumer.23 As Gretchen Schultz

underscores, while many of the poets of Parnassus were not necessarily vocal supporters

of Napoléon III’s regime or politics, “[they] cloaked their political agenda in the mantle

of apolitical indifference, (…) stand[ing] in consistent and conscious opposition to the

poetry of social commitment championed (…) by Desbordes-Valmore and Hugo.”24

Leconte de Lisle, “the imposing and manly (…) ‘homme […] de marbre’”25 who

was arguably the movement’s figurehead under the Second Empire, perhaps best

sense of self becomes dissipated and uncentered – unable, what’s more, to find any meaningful venue of
expression in the sphere of the political, politics itself becomes heinous, stupid, in sum, bourgeois. Still,
Lidsky reminds us that the salon culture of the Second Empire and its system of patronages managed to
effectively annex whatever resistance in literary circles that the empire hadn’t managed to exile. A case in
point would be that of Leconte de Lisle, the poet commonly regarded as the fondateur of Parnassian
esthetics: during the Paris Commune, the archives of the Prefecture of Paris revealed that de Lisle was paid
handsomely (an annual rent of 4,500 francs) from imperial coffers. See, Paul Lidsky, Les Écrivains contre
la Commune (Paris: La Découverte, 1999) p. 17 ; Seth Whidden, Leaving Parnassus, op. cit., p. 20. See
also, Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 28-33.
23
Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 41-42.
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, un poète lyrique à l’apogée du capitalisme (Paris: Payot, 2006), pp.
84-100, 260, n. 7.
24
Gretchen Schultz, op. cit., p. 84.
25
Ibid., p. 87.
 43

synthesized the undergirding attitude of repulsion to history common to the Parnassians

with a laconic, “Je hais mon temps”.26 But the Parnassian “school” of poetry’s true

Confiteor can actually be found at the very heart of the romantic generation, in the

preface to Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Therein, Gautier bequeathed to

future generations of writers the single commandement of l’art pour l’art: “Il n’y a de

vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid […] –

L’endroit le plus utile d’une maison, ce sont les latrines.”27

Gautier indeed had something of a knack for producing statements that are in fact

meta-discursive commentaries on the very enunciative structures (or dare we say,

ideology) of Parnassian poetics. To take one very brief example, a quatrain isolated from

a poem entitled “L’art” (in Émaux et camées):

Tout passe – l’art robuste

Seul a l’éternité.
Le buste
Survit à la cité.28

Here, the “city” mentioned at the close of the quatrain is to be understood not only

as the melancholic topography of a ruined ancient city that the poet surveys as a kind of

pure, disembodied gaze of (necessarily fantasized historical) knowledge,29 and not merely

as a kind of clichéd tempus fugit reflection on the ephemeral nature of human existence

(for which the city would function as a metonym). The “city” in question also needs to be

read as a statement in which esthetics outlives politics, in which the individual work of

art triumphs timelessly over community – or, perhaps more accurately, strives to

26
Leconte de Lisle, “Préface,” in Poèmes et poésies (Paris : Dentu, 1855), p iv.
27
Théophile Gautier, “Préface,” in Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris : Garnier, 1960), p. 23.
28
Théophile Gautier, Émaux et camées (Paris : Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1903), p. 189.
29
This same fantasy of radical absence mixed with a divine epistemological perspective – in
psychoanalytic terms, this no doubt resonates with (or inverts?) the fantasy of the primal scene as “seeing
the moment of one’s conception” from a world in ruins can also be found in the above-mentioned preface
to Mlle Maupin, as well as in Maxime du Camp’s Paris: Ses organes, ses fonctions.
 44

apotropaically conjure up the political in order to deny its very pertinence for the

esthetic.30 Indeed, the hyper-esthetic formalist rigidity of Parnassian poetry31 ought

rightly to be understood as the poetic “school’s” political unconscious. Ross Chambers

was perhaps the first to pick up on the post-coup-d’état generation’s neurotic

ambivalence towards the political in his analysis of Gautier’s 1852 “Préface” to Émaux et

camées, in which the repression of the noise of revolution (“sans prendre garde à

l’ouragan / qui fouettait mes vitres fermées) “returns with a vengeance”. The very

structure of the verse where this political “repression,” or repression of the political, takes

place seems to mark itself as the site of a traumatic encounter – that is, the syntagm

where the metaphorical hurricane beats at the poet’s windows is in contre-rejet, drawing

the reader’s attention to the ontologically and symbolically disruptive event that is the

revolution that the poet affirms he peacefully ignored in favor of his poetry.32 A similar,

phantasmagorical return of the repressed can, furthermore, be detected in the poem cited

above, for in the first stanza of “L’art” we find the sememe “rebelle,” and in the last we

find “résistant”. Despite the poet’s better efforts, in other words, “art” remains an

ideological space where social conflict and antagonism, where rebellion and resistance,

and made legible. The city in question, then, needs to be understood as referring also to

the polis of the Republic – not simply Plato’s but, much closer to them, the Republic of

the 1848 revolution, the destruction of which the Parnassian movement sought

30
Still, as Peter Bürger argues, there is a demonstrable tendency amongst revolutionary and esthetic avant-
gardes to retreat into themselves upon encountering the bitter fruits of their attempts to change the world or,
perhaps more modestly, bourgeois society. See Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 83-94. My thanks to Christophe Wall-Romana for this insightful
reference.
31
E.g., its abhorrence of the perceived poetic provocations of Romanticism such as its destabilization of the
cesura, and its use of “hardy enjambments”Gretchen Schultz, op. cit., p. 83.
32
See Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, op. cit., pp. 44-47.
 45

(impossibly) to disavow altogether by banishing the city from poetry rather than poetry

from the city.

Finally, of particular importance for understanding the distance that Rimbaud

stakes out for himself with respect to the literary models of his time in “Les Reparties de

Nina” and “Au Cabaret-vert,” is the question of the representation of the feminine, of the

beau as such. As we shall see in Rimbaud’s poem, the two are linked, and any ironic

revalorization of le beau implies a repositioning of the feminine. For if, as Mallarmé put

it, “les parnassiens [étaient] amoureux du vers très stricte, du beau par lui-même,” this

beau was best exemplified in two ways. First and foremost, it was represented by a

versification that was perhaps just as reified as its representations of the feminine other, a

point we ought to keep in mind when we engage with the structural harassment to which

Rimbaud submits, say, the alexandrine and the sonnet. The question of the formal rigor of

Parnassian poetry is an important aspect of Rimbaud’s engagement with his

contemporaries. Indeed, if we fail to take this into account, many formal subversions in

his early poetry, to say nothing of their semantic content, lose much of their scandalous

esthetic and ideological significance. Indeed, in many respects, at least one half of the

Parnassian movement (specifically, that part of Parnassus that was identified, at the

expense of, say, Baudelaire or Verlaine, with Leconte de Lisle) was something akin to the

literary equivalent of the parti de l’ordre, a kind of poetic Bonapartisme demanding an

esthetics of order and strict observance of the laws of useless, reified beauty. As Catulle

Mendès put it, “Nous [les Parnassiens] n’avaient rien en commun sinon la jeunesse de

l’espoir, la haine du débraillé poétique et la chimère de la beauté parfaite.”33

33
Catulle Mendès, La légende du Parnasse Contemporain (Bruxelles : Brancart, 1884), cited in S.
Whidden, Leaving Parnassus, op. cit. p. 18. Perhaps another way of looking at the impersonal ethos of a
 46

The second example of the mid-nineteenth-century poetic “beau par lui-même”

can be found in the Parnassian metaphoric economy of statues, and especially statues

representing feminine models. Broadly speaking, the status of the feminine at the lyrical

heights of Mont Parnassus is in fact one of two statues: either the goddess of antiquity

(Athena, Venus, Diane, etc.) or the memorial statue on a grave. The pivot upon which the

Parnassians “turned away” from the present is thus closely aligned with the feminine. As

Whidden reminds us, this cortical esthetic figure of Parnassian poetry is no doubt best

exemplified in Charles Cros’ poem (dedicated to Catulle Mendès and appearing in the

second Parnasse contemporain), “La Dame en pierre,” where the poet imagines an erotic

encounter with the funeral statue of a medieval chatelaine which culminates in the

quatrain:34

La mort n’a pas atteint le beau

La chair perverse est tuée
Mais la forme est, sur un tombeau
Perpétuée.

In either case, whether as dead woman and or as goddess, the figure of “Woman”

(to say nothing of “women”) is essentially reduced to a symbolically immobilized

fragment of language, when it does not point towards a mortification in/of language

itself. For “Woman,” the (unenviable) feminine ideal advanced by Rimbaud’s

contemporaries was either a divine phallic-mother, or a dead one. Gretchen Schultz

summarizes the stakes of the subjective positions available to women within the

“statutory” poetics of Parnassus thus: “Parnassian representations relegated women to the

certain current of Parnassus is to see in its esthetics of reification an effect of nineteenth century capitalism
as it took off and radically disrupted social relations and spaces in the Paris of the Second Empire. For
more on the disruptions of Haussmannization in the realm of art history, see T.J. Clark’s impressive The
Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, revised edition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 23-79.
34
Whidden’s excellent reading of this poem, to which my own understanding of the literary context at the
end of the Second Empire is extensively indebted, can be found in his Leaving Parnassus, op. cit., pp. 35-
40.
 47

role of frozen object, a passive and impassive incarnation of idealized beauty, forbidding

her subjective expression more stringently than before.”35 It is precisely upon this

esthetico-political horizon, and within this semiotic system, that we must situate the

dramatically funny and revolutionary representation of the feminine in Rimbaud’s early

verse, and perhaps nowhere more so than in “Les Reparties de Nina” and “Au Cabaret-

Vert, cinq heures du soir”.

We know with a reasonable degree of certainty that “Au Cabaret-vert,” an early

sonnet included in the recueil Demeny, no doubt dates from the late summer or early

autumn of 1870. The collection of texts known as the recueil Demeny owes its name to

the poet and editor, Paul Demeny. Demeny, who was an acquaintance of Rimbaud’s

professor, George Izambard, lived in Douai, and had self-published a collection of

bucolic poems entitled, Les Glaneuses. If Rimbaud’s letter to Izambard on 25 August

1870 is any indication, Rimbaud did not have a very high opinion of this work, nor of its

author. Thus, it is quite likely that, when Rimbaud left a collection of what he no doubt

regarded as his most accomplished verse pieces on the door-step of Demeny’s house in

late October, he did so in the hopes that the already-published Demeny would help the

aspiring poet get his foot in the door of the Parisian literary world.36

35
Gretchen Schultz, op. cit., p. 85. Schultz points out that, on the end of the spectrum dealing with esthetic
reaction, Parnassus was rebelling against the perception of Romantic poetry’s feminine disorder (e.g.,
trimetric alexandrines, ambiguous caesurae, recourse to “loose” verse meter such as the enneasyllabe
championed by Desbordes-Valmore in her sonnets, and of course its emphasis on subjective affect). Hence,
its insistence on strict versification and its heavy recourse to at-times abscond references to Greek antiquity
may be theoretically seen as the attempt to draw a masculinist cordon around access to the poetic as such.
Romantic poetry was also “feminized” in another, more literal sense if we recall that perhaps the founding
“mother” of nineteenth century lyrical poetry was not Lamartine, but Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.
36
Steve Murphy argues elsewhere that, contrary to the myth of the disinterested poet who seeks merely to
throw poetic bombs and then flame out, much of Rimbaud’s correspondence from the years 1870-72
demonstrates that the poet was intent on becoming a published author, and that a conjuncture of economic,
political and heteronormative problems (i.e., his reputation as a gay communard responsible for the
destruction of an upright bourgeois marriage) ultimately frustrated this ambition. See, Steve Murphy, “Une
 48

Rimbaud actually made his way through Charleroi between 1870-1872 on at least

three different occasions (it’s perhaps worth mentioning that an establishment known as

the Maison Verte actually existed at the time and was situated in a slightly dodgy

neighborhood just across the plaza from the Charleroi train station):37 the first of such

visits occurred when Rimbaud first ran away from home, on the afternoon of 29 August,

1870. He apparently abandoned his mother and sisters on their afternoon walk, mumbling

something about returning to the family apartment on the banks of the Meuse. Instead, he

sold the books he had recently been awarded for best Latin theme (amongst other

academic prizes) for train-fare to Charleroi (trains between the capital and Charleville

were no longer running, due to the presence of a massive Prussian army that had recently

flowed over the border with Belgium). From Charleroi, he took the train to Paris, where

he was promptly arrested for traveling without fare and taken to Mazas prison. His case

doubtless wasn’t helped much by the fact that he was coming to the soon-to-be besieged

city, which was also in a state of total chaos due to the imminent collapse of the Empire,

from an enemy-occupied province. Rescued from prison by his friend and former

professor, Georges Izambard, Rimbaud accompanied his savior to Izambard’s aunts’

house in Douai, where he had just enough time to put his host’s reputation in danger by

drafting a Pétition de la garde nationale de Douai contre le maire de Charleville.38

saison en purgatoire (petite dose d’anti-mythes rimbaldologiques),” in Lectures des Poésies et d’Une saison
en enfer de Rimbaud, S. Murphy, ed. (Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 333-43.
37
“C’était une auberge située dans la Ville-Basse, rue de la Station (actuellement Place Emile-Buisset), en
face de la gare (…).” Jean-Jacques Lefrère, cited in, Marc Danval, “Rimbaud au Cabaret-vert à Charleroi,”
in Rimbaud Vivant 46 (Juin, 2007), p. 54. According to Steve Murphy, the café was later annexed to the
adjacent Hôtel de l’espérance (the color of which, but after all this is no doubt simply a coincidence, is
green). See, Arthur Rimbaud Oeuvres Complètes, t.I: poésies, Steve Murphy, ed. (Paris: Honoré Champion,
1999), pp. 293-5.
38
See, Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes, A. Guyaux, ed., op. cit., pp. 403-5.
 49

The second visit to Charleroi, Belgium was nearly a month later, during a second

fugue over the course of which the poet left Charleville on foot and made his way to a

school-mate’s home in Charleroi looking for work, apparently as a journalist. Needless to

say, things don’t precisely go as well as the poet had hoped (he apparently scandalizes his

hosts with his ruby-red political opinions),39 and, once more on foot, he heads back

towards the French border. Destination: Douai, where, as we stated, he ostensibly hopes

that making the acquaintance of Paul Demeny will pay off with a publication of his own.

During his stay in Douai, he has just enough time to recopy the poems of the recueil

Demeny (which included “Au Cabaret-vert,” “Les Reparties de Nina,” and “Le Dormeur

du Val”) before the police catch up with him and haul him back to Charleville.

The third and, for all we know, final visit, takes place in 1872, when he and

Verlaine are on their way to Brussels, and ultimately London. It is significant that during

this voyage with Verlaine, in the turbulent political and cultural aftermath of the

Commune and its repression, the spectral image of the “Cabaret-vert” continues in a

certain respect to haunt the poetic imaginary of Rimbaud’s texts, as the following poem

written no doubt in Brussels in the summer of 1872 (section 4, “Le Pauvre songe,” from

“Comédie de la soif”) suggests:

-Ah songer est indigne

Puisque c’est pure perte!

Et si je redeviens
Le voyageur ancien
Jamais l’auberge verte
Ne peut bien m’être ouverte.40

39
Graham Robb, Rimbaud, A Biography (London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000), pp. 56-64.
40
Arthur Rimbaud, “Comédie de la soif,” in Œuvres Complètes, A. Guyaux, ed. (Paris : La Pléiade, 2009),
p. 201. My italics. The cohabitation with Verlaine is particularly remarkable in these lines, the effect of
which, through the use of rich, flat rhyme schemes, is very close to the kind of “chansonification” of verse
that Verlaine propounded in his Ars poetica (“De la musique, avant toute chose”), and which Michel Murat
identifies, along with a marked shift away from the alexandrine in favor of “simple” forms (i.e., ones not
requiring a caesura) as being the formal water-mark of this period of Rimbaud’s textual production. This
 50

What I propose to try and account for here is the later sense of unmitigated (c’est

pure perte) and melancholic loss, of foreclosure, surrounding the dream which is

associated with the “Green Inn”. For at stake is not just a phenomenological reflection on

time, becoming, and unsurpassable finitude. The poet is not just saying, in other words,

“you can never go back again” to the sense of freedom that one had as an adolescent

running away from home. Rather, we need to interrogate the contours of this freedom and

this happiness (contrasted with the ulterior melancholic loss of the “dream”), and

understand them not just as an individual or psychological phenomena, but as collective

ones; as forming the end-point, the sun-drenched telos, of a dream of community given

expression in the space of poetry.

Before we do so, however, let us not forget where this poem is staged. Rimbaud’s

poem unfolds in a strictly communal context, in a shared space, a space of the common

and of pleasure, of play and indiscipline, in a doubly marginalized space: it takes place in

a cabaret in la pauvre Belgique (as Baudelaire once put it with the kind of unadulterated

sneering derision of which only a Parisian dandy with deeply wounded pride is capable).

A word or two is necessary about the context of the poem, the common-place that

Rimbaud lets emerge within a field of representation that is normally meant to produce

and legitimate unequal socio-symbolic relationships. As no previous readers of this poem

have proposed to think about the cultural, historical, and political specificity of the

cabaret in nineteenth century France, and in order to better account for the relation of

should also lead us to nuance somewhat the doxa according to which the question of poetic influence was
monovalent for the couple Rimbaud-Verlaine. See Michel Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud (Paris: José Corti,
2005), pp. 90-103.
 51

Rimbaud’s “Cabaret” to the radical politics of the nineteenth-century cabaret, let us ask

the question:

II. What Is a Cabaret?

What is at stake here is not the elaboration of an a contrario essentialized and

romanticized vision of the “cabaret” as the site of the “demos’” ontological and historical

“truth”. On the contrary, the cabaret, or guinguette or estaminet or any other locus that we

tend to identify as the site of a counter-cultural formation of daily life, are not

homogenous spaces. As Jacques Rancière put it, even if the cabaret managed to function

as a space where the dull and deadening cycle of workplace discipline was provisionally,

momentarily ruptured in favor of a kind of timeless time of leisure, the cabaret did not for

as much “overthrow the authority of the workshop”.41 Nevertheless, there is room to

broaden the scope of Rancière’s assertion, which, for as empirically and historically valid

as it may be, can all the same be theoretically interrogated so as to see in the cabaret, the

wine-shop or the guingette, a site of democratic ebullience, of nodal connection between

the private and the public where this perhaps essentially bourgeois division is

complicated, where the rules and discipline of the work-shop are, if not irrevocably

overthrown, perhaps at least provisionally questioned, debated, ridiculed, indeed

suspended. Indeed, in a much later work, Rancière is keen to point out that a certain

disciplining of the link between the “order of discourse” and the “order of the city” is

necessary in order to stabilize and legitimize the symbolic and ontological privileging of

one class (say, of “thinkers”) over another (say, “those who work”). The question then

41
Jacques Rancière, “Good times or pleasure at the barriers,” in Voices of the People: The Politics and Life
of ‘La Sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire, Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas, eds. (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988) p. 47.
 52

becomes: how can one identify a worker? To which the deafeningly tautological response

would be: “by his/her working” – workers are defined, that is, by the functional position

they occupy in a hierarchical system where “leisure” is inequitably distributed. 42

As Rancière notes,43 the nineteenth-century cabaret can in fact function as an

effectively mixed site, a “half real, half fantastic geography of class exchanges” where

contracts were negotiated amongst patrons and ouvriers, where workplace allegiances

were forged,44 and where a frequently ambivalent encounter across class-lines and

fantasies of the Other took place between a bourgeois leisure-class and the working

class.45

Let us posit, then, the “cabaret” as a highly polyvalent, mobile site – a position

that theoretically and historically is not quite as paradoxical as at first glance it may seem.

If we consider, as have Alain Cottereau and Alain Faure,46 the historical importance of

such sites at the end of the Second Empire, and the importance of their potential

42
Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003),
pp. 24-48. A telling illustration of this partage du sensible from Zola can be located in the curious spectacle
(i.e., for the bourgeoisie) of Gervaise and her family visiting the Louvre in L’Assomoir. This working class
family is not only geographically out of place (whence the metaphoric importance of their attempt to locate
the suburb of Belleville from atop the Vendome column), but symbolically out of place as well in the
privatized – that is, classed – public space of leisure and esthetics that is the museum.
43
Ibid., pp. 67.
44
Ibid. The example which invariably leaps to mind from the literary imaginary of the era is that of the
Mme la Veuve Désire’s Cabaret from Zola’s Germinal (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1983), pp. 154-
7. In Les Misérables, for that matter, Victor Hugo portrays the Parisian café of the restoration as the site
par excellence of opposition and political conspiracies (it should be recalled that in many respects Hugo’s
restoration Paris is a thinly-veiled allegory of the Paris of the Second Empire). It is in the café Musain, for
example, that Marius first encounters republican politics and indeed becomes an “ami de l’A B C” (an
intriguing calembour that is to be read, l’abaissé, or, le peuple), or a member of a secret society that also
meets in the more democratically named cabaret Corinthe. See Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, t. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1995), p. 817.
45
For more on these at times ambivalent encounters, see, Jacques Rancière, “Good Times…,” op. cit., p.
67; Alain Cottereau, “‘Le Sublime’ – a preliminary study of daily life and workers’ resistance in Paris in
1870,” in Voices of the People…, op. cit., pp. 99-177; Simone Delattre, Les Douzes heures noires: la nuit à
Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), pp. 522-32.
46
Cf., Alain Cottereau, “ ‘Le sublime…’,” op. cit., pp. 160-5 ; Alain Faure, “The Public Meeting
Movement in Paris from 1868 to 1870,” in Voices of the People, op. cit., pp. 181-234.
 53

convertibility – sometimes literally overnight –47 from sites of leisure into sites of

democratic debate and public meetings, then the cabaret emerges as a specific knot in a

theoretical strand that binds the public to the private spheres. This linkage takes place in a

gesture that was not only not anticipated by the Second Empire during its phase of

“liberalization” (1865-1870), but that, call it the “cunning of Reason,” ultimately ended

up creating the conditions of possibility for working-class identity formations and

political alliances in Paris without which the Commune of 1871 might have been

unimaginable.

Hence, when Rimbaud chooses to situate his poem in a cabaret, a simple bar, we

ought to bear in mind that this didascalia is, in terms both esthetic and political, far from

neutral. In negative terms, the “cabaret” plays a cortical role in defining working-class

deviance in nineteenth-century disciplinary literature. Indeed, it becomes a commonplace

(in both the rhetorical and the slightly more theoretical senses of the term) in the

topologies and taxonomies of the poor written with the aim of “moralizing” or

“educating” them. Frégier, that Dante of disciplinary power, no doubt summed up the

sentiments of his class when he wrote that the cabaret (or café, or gargotte, etc.) posed a

nearly intolerable menace to socio-political stability. Going to the cabaret, whether it was

just the men going out for a drink after getting the Saturday pay or the whole family

(clearly a horrifying proposition for him) going there on a Sunday outing, was to engage

on slippery slope of excessive and undisciplined freedom, in his view; one that led to

skipping work (a practice ironically referred to as “respecter le Saint Lundi”), to

47
As Faure points out, “[a] simple on-the-spot change [allowed] music and dancing [to] g[i]ve way to
political speeches”. Alain Faure, “The Public Meeting Movement…,” op. cit., p. 208.
 54

debauchery amongst working class women and children,48 to the propagation of that

“vice funeste (…) le plus grand fléau des classes laborieuses”49 known as ivrognerie, to

the breaking-up of families, to prostitution, and, ultimately, to involvement in politics. In

sum, the cabaret figures as the imaginary site where the bourgeoisie as such, its economy,

organization, and discourse disintegrates; the locus where “civilization” is dissolved by

contact with the demos.

The primary symbolic effect of these discourses, whether we find them in the

police reports of Frégier, the medico-philanthropical studies of Moreau-Christophe, or

even the working-class novels of Emile Zola, is a strategic infantilization, a discursive

disqualification of working-class subjects from the public sphere and from the discussion

of the affairs of the res publica. What results is not only the construction, elaboration, and

dissemination of bourgeois norms regulating questions of space, time, and the body itself:

how are families to be housed, for example? How should workers spend their time when

not at work? Who can legitimately occupy the space of the object of desire and who

cannot? What are the effects of excessive drinking on the body, and by extension, on the

machinery of capitalism?

In terms of their ultimate stakes, therefore, we would do well to see in this

semiotic tactic of marginalization, and by extension in the importance that such sites as

the “cabaret” assume as tropes within a class-determined discourse of power/knowledge,

48
One might also mention that, across the English Channel, the view is every bit as apocalyptic. What’s
more, a similar tone of moral outrage and barely concealed jouissance afforded by these voyeuristic romps
into the “bas fonds” can be detected by social explorers, philanthropists, civil servants and journalists
writing in England at mid-to-late century. The rhetorical trope consisting in simultaneously animalizing and
infantilizing the working-classes seems to be, if not a trans-European discursive tendency, at least an
Anglo-French one. See Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality and Desire
Among Working-Class Men and Women in Nineteenth-Century London (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 5-37.
49
H.A. Frégier, Des classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes et des moyens de les
rendre meilleures, T. II (Paris : J.B. Baillière, 1840), p. 221-4.
 55

a strategy for the symbolic and practical consolidation of socio-economic and political

power; behind moralistic and hygienic prescriptions for creating a harmonious society,

we can hear, in the apocalyptic descriptions of the effects of the cabaret and drinking on

the working-classes, the rumblings of a disavowed conflict (that, no doubt, of class

antagonism) around the questions of time and freedom itself.

Alfred Delvau – of the Dictionnaire de la langue verte fame – writes in his 1862

history of Parisian cafés and cabarets that, “(…) en écrivant une histoire des cabarets et

cafés parisiens, [on est] exposé à écrire une histoire de toutes les classes de la société

parisienne”. And, though he was far from an apologist for emancipatory democratic

movements in his personal politics, Delvau was a shrewd enough urban anthropologist of

his time and milieu to notice that when one crossed the threshold into the café and the

cabaret, a kind of egalitarian principle was actualized in the laughter, forgetting, and

circulation of speech. Indeed, for Delvau, writing in the preface50 to his Histoire

anecdotique des cafés et cabarets de Paris, the cabaret was viewed in the nineteenth

century as a traditional and disquieting locus democraticus. Yet, there’s actually nothing

all that terribly problematic, either for Delvau or for, say, the spies of the imperial police,

with this prospect. After all, the repressive hypothesis being what it is, we might as well

readily acknowledge that it is actually in the interest of power to have easily identifiable

spaces where oppositional speech can flourish: it makes it all the more easy to take the

pulse of public opinion amongst those most likely to pose a real threat to the regime’s

stability,51 to spy on political malcontents and agitators, to keep tails on them, to

50
Interestingly enough, this preface is entitled, “avant d’entrer”. Metaphorically, if unintentionally, Delvau
makes his text into a kind of utopian tissue linking the different classes to one another in his cabarets.
51
And, as Richard Terdiman, following Eric Hobsbawm, points out, Napoleon III was the first modern
politician in the sense that he ruled “not simply by armed force, but by the sort of demagogy and public
 56

surround, saturate, and attempt to capture within the folds of discourse their potentially

seditious speech, desires, and activities. Until 1868, public assembly was outlawed under

in France, and the legal definition of political speeches at public assemblies was

intentionally vague enough to include holding-forth in a bar – an example fairly typical of

retrieving with the right hand what the left hand just gave in nineteenth-century French

politics that was exploited by the imperial regime throughout the 1850s and 60s. 52

As Delvau points out in a distinctively anxious passage, the particularly

dangerous aspect of the cabaret is not just that it tends to en-act, or make visible, a certain

egalitarian community; it is not merely that the cabaret renders effable an utopic re-

imagining of society. Rather, the real danger lies in the prospect that the socially

marginalized and economically exploited classes might take these things seriously. The

cabaret and café, as well as other sites where something like class identities and

discourses of resistance get elaborated and disseminated under the Second Empire,

represents not just a democratic space, but a potentially revolutionary space, the type of

space in which tomorrow’s St. Just and Robespierre are always already here, silently

sipping away at glasses of beer, dreaming of falling (imperial) heads and toppling

governments:

Il y a longtemps, mon ami, que les cafés et les cabarets sont les ‘salons de la démocratie’
– pour employer la juste expression de M. Hippolyte Castille. Les salons de la
démocratie, - c’est-à-dire de tout le monde, puisque l’aristocratie a été guillotinée le 21
janvier 1793. Les lieux et leurs habitués ont changé, mais les habitudes sont restées les

relations (…) creating an image of rule.” Hobsbawm, cited in, R. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse:
The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985), p. 45.
52
One example, from the domain of post-Commune literature, of this type of domestic spying on political
opposition, would be Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, the protagonist of which (Florent) “plots” throughout the
novel to overthrow the Empire, only to be arrested by the Imperial police at the novel’s anti-climax, when
the reader learns that the police had been spying on Florent since well before he’d even arrived in the
Halles neighborhood of Paris. See, Emile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris (Paris: Librairie Générale Française,
1984), especially the passages on the importance of Lebigre’s café as meeting-place for revolutionary
clubs, pp. 129-36 and 174-86.
 57

mêmes. Ce ne sont plus ni les mêmes cabarets ni les mêmes buveurs, mais ce sont
toujours des cabarets et des buveurs.53

Writing in 1862, that is, with the relatively recent experience of repression of the

left in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution and the subsequent coup d’état fresh in mind,

the political stakes in play in the cabaret, for the dominant class at least, were far from

theoretical. While images of the imperial police placing mouchards in every corner

estaminet of working-class neighborhoods are notorious, they were so for a very concrete

reason. As John Merriman demonstrates, the political repression of the republican left

that began under the bourgeois Republic in June of 1848 had as its fulcrum the repression

of cafés and cabarets, which “provided convenient sites for ordinary people to get

together and discuss politics”.54 Merriman goes on to note that, under the short-lived

Second Republic, the ministry of justice was just as concerned about the effects that

cabaret-life had on working-class morality as by the political discussion that seemed

rampant in cabarets, by the seemingly irresistible tendency for individual ressentiment to

convert into collective critique or indeed rejection of the bourgeois republic. As one spy

in the town of Nancy reports, “‘The cafés are the scourge of the small towns; they have

proven even better for the ‘men of disorder’ than the clubs’ (….); Marshal Castellane

claimed that the cafés of St. Etienne served ten thousand potential insurgents: ‘Each

evening [there are] 722 meetings, where ten or twelve workers discuss political questions

53
Alfred Delvau, Histoire anecdotique des cafés et cabarets de Paris, avec dessins et eaux-fortes (Paris : E.
Dentu, 1862), pp. vii-viii. For his part, Yves Reboul identifies a very similar sense of bourgeois disquiet in
the Goncourts’ novel, Charles Demailly, which describes the “lien entre bohème et brasserie, la pénétration
par ce milieu de la petite presse, surtout satirique, la haine sociale et les enjeux de pouvoir réels qui se
dissimul[aient] derrière un genre de vie à l’apparence insouciante.” Yves Reboul, Rimbaud dans son
temps (Paris : Edition Classiques Garnier, 2009), p. 73
54
John Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France 1848-
1851 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 96-9.
 58

while drinking and pass along instructions to each other.’”55 Working-class sites of

leisure were thus inextricably intermingled with the dangerous potential for the

elaboration of class identities, and for the formation of oppositional postures and culture.

As the following draconian decree issued under the Second Republic suggests, the

cabaret was clearly a site where unregulated speech and radical republican politics

erupted. In its polyvalence and its immanent convertibility into a site of oppositionality, 56

it was the topological equivalent of that other symbol of nineteenth-century resistance

and revolt, the barricade:

In future [sic] theatre managers and producers of shows, concerts and café-chantants in
Paris and the suburbs will not be permitted to use their posters and programmes to
advertise first performances of any dramatic work, play, single scene, cantata, romance,
song, or chansonette, in a word anything which is to be recited, sung or performed in
public, without first having received approval for the script or scenario from the Minister
of the Interior (…).57

Still, to return to the previous reflection, Delvau indeed puts his finger on

something that we contemporaries ought to keep in mind if we are to avoid anachronistic

readings or theories of the socio-cultural significance of the cabaret across the class

divides. That is to say, we must keep in mind the very simple fact, as Susanna Barrows

points out,58 the figure of the cabaret before and after the Paris Commune poses two very

different problems for bourgeois society – one which we could, albeit somewhat

schematically, say correspond to the difference between a disciplinary and a biopolitical

55
Ibid.
56
By this, I seek to claim that the everyday space of being-together can always be transformed into, is
always already in a radical sense, an other-space, a heterotopia. In Adrian Rifkin’s analysis, “the most
organized aspects of [proletarian] culture, such as the goguettes in Paris, were clearly capable of operating
as effective vehicles of political protest and secret organization (…).” Adrian Rifkin, “Cultural Movement
and the Paris Commune,” Art History 2:2 (June, 1979), p. 203.
57
Jacques Rancière, “Good times…,” op. cit., p. 46. This decree was maintained well through-out the
Second Empire.
58
Susanna Barrows, “After the Commune: Alcoholism, Temperance, and Literature in the Early Third
Republic,” in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, J. Merriman, ed. (New
York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 205-19.
 59

power/knowledge configuration. Reading the likes of Jules Simon, Villermé, H.A.

Frégier and other moralists, philanthropists and social “explorers,” one could almost lose

sight of the fact that it isn’t until after the Paris Commune that the “medical” discourse of

alcoholism gains social traction and is generalized not only as an actual medico-

pathological theory, but also as a kind of short-hand hermeneutic device for

simultaneously explaining (i.e., neutralizing) the political event of the Paris Commune

and passing over the inherent class antagonisms and systemic aporias within nineteenth-

century French capitalism which led to the proclamation of the Commune in the first

place and which were by no means resolved by its violent repression.

As Barrows accurately sums up, according to this narrative, which is hardly

restricted to medical discourse,59 “[b]y equating revolution with alcoholism, Thiers’s

defenders could bypass any painful discussion of the social and economic causes which

triggered the revolt, and they could dismiss the Communards’ vision of social justice as

the wild hallucinations of a dipsomaniac.” Perhaps unconsciously channeling Zola, to

whom she is otherwise sympathetic in her analysis, Barrows goes on to mention the

specifically biopolitical dimension in which the murder of 25,000 Parisians was

explained to the French people: “The bloodletting which finally ended the rebellion could

be justified as a necessary operation in the interest of national health.”60 In short, it is for

decidedly ideological reasons, and not until the 1870s, and principally thanks to the

59
See Paul Lidsky’s Les Écrivains contre la Commune, op. cit.
60
Suzanne Barrows, art. cit., p. 209. Compare, for instance, this statement to the final pages of Zola’s
Débâcle, or to the essentially similar conclusion of the article he wrote for Le Sémaphore de Marseille in
June, 1871 summing up for the bourgeoisie the lesson to be learned from the events of May: “Le bain de
sang que [le peuple de Paris] vient de prendre était peut-être d’une horrible nécessité pour calmer certaines
de ses fièvres. Vous le verrez maintenant grandir en sagesse et splendeur.” Émile Zola, Oeuvres Complètes,
t. 4, P. Clarke and B. Desgranges, eds. (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2003), p. 584.
 60

works of psychiatrists such as Laborde and Lunier,61 that we see the transition from

l’ivrognerie as the affliction of the laboring classes to the much more insidious discursive

configuration of degeneracy and alcoholism as a hereditary problem specifically located

amongst the working-classes and which menaces the social fabric as such (the archetypal

instance of the kind of discourse we are dealing with, in literary history, are Zola’s

working-class novels, and especially L’Assommoir). Popular best-sellers such as, to take

but one striking example, the 1878 edition of La France contemporaine, ou les Français

peints par eux-mêmes (études de moeurs et de littérature) attest to an intensification of

what we could call the pathologizing discourse of power with respect to the recent

memory of the Commune. By far, the most violent passages come from a certain

Alphonse de Pontmartin, who, in an article enticingly entitled La Décomposition sociale

par la littérature, accounts for the uprising of the Commune by strategically mobilizing

both an anti-democratic and a pseudo-medical discourse of degeneration that attributes

the woes of France to: (a) the increasing practice of reading of novels (Balzac and Hugo

are singled out as objects of special anathema) by “dangerous subjects”;62 (b) the

61
Dr. Lunier, “De l’influence des grandes commotions politiques et sociales sur le développement des
maladies mentales,” Annales médico-psychologiques, 5 :9 (1873) ; Dr. Jean-Baptiste V. Laborde, Les
hommes de l’insurrection de Paris devant la psychologie morbide (Paris: Donnaud, 1872). My thanks to
Laure Murat for pointing out these fascinating texts in which the theory of morbus democraticus, the
disease of democracy that had been floating around in the pseudo-medical discipline we might call proto-
psychiatry since at least the 1840s, is fully articulated. Ian Dowbiggin persuasively argues that it is in fact
psychiatry’s disciplinary willingness, especially after the Commune, to co-opt the class prejudices of the
bourgeoisie and to put a veneer of objective, scientific knowledge on them that led to psychiatry’s
acceptance as a bona fide medial discourse in the late nineteenth century. See, Ian Dowbiggin,
“Degeneration and hereditarianism in French mental medicine 1840-90: psychiatric theory as ideological
adaptation,” in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. I, People and Ideas,
W.F. Bynum et al., eds. (London and New York: Tavistock, 1985), pp. 189-232. See also Catherine
Glazer’s “De la Commune comme maladie mentale,” Romantisme 48 (1985), pp. 63-70.
62
On the potential dangers of letting le peuple read books that they are “parfaitement incapable de
comprendre,” see Jules Michelet, L’Étudiant (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1899), pp. 18-21. For Michelet, the
circulation of literature needed to be carefully policed. In essence, the problem seemed to be that, if you let
the peuple read Rousseau or Voltaire, they tend to take away from these readings only what is most
scabrous, most critical of prevailing relations of socio-economic exploitation. At base, the problem is that
 61

pernicious spreading of what are referred to in particularly ominous tones as “des

doctrines dissolvantes” leading to a “fantasmagorie” of revolution (“une sorte

d’émulation patricide” which “règne dans le camp de la démocratie”)63 that “exulte

l’esprit” of the mentally ill, the criminal and of alcoholics. De Pontmartin describes these

marginal subjects – who were themselves to blame for the “dure nécéssité de [les]

fusiller,” as another contributor states with the kind of cold biopolitical logic that we

ought to understand as inevitably resulting from discursive operations whose aim is the

derealization of violence64 – as motivated solely by anger, like an impatient child or the

uncivilized barbarians that once sacked Rome and brought Western civilization to its

knees (and the dark ages).65 As a kind of monstrous hybrid of the infans and the demos:

Avez-vous déjà rencontré un enfant essayant de rattraper son [image] dans un miroir, et,
dans son impatience (…) jeter le miroir à terre (…)? Voilà l’image de la Commune: (…)
elle a eu recours à l’expédient facile, mais inefficace, de l’enfant et du barbare.66

It’s perhaps just a little (too) fortuitous that the child and the invading barbarian

hordes are precisely at the heart of Michel Foucault’s distinction – at least if we stay at

the people is always on the look out for the côté negatif. In other words, if the bourgeoisie goes to the
trouble of getting them a book, the only thanks they risk getting is to see them use the book to argue for the
political destitution of the bourgeoisie.
63
These “dissolving doctrines” can only be combated by the injunction for a return to the police logic of
consensus, or, as de Pontmartin puts it: “Laboremus (…) doit devenir notre mot d’ordre. Laboremus –
travaillons!” “La décomposition sociale par la littérature,” in La France Contemporaine, ou les Français
peints par eux-mêmes (études de mœurs et de littérature), Johannes Baumgarten, ed. (Paris : Cassel, 1878),
pp. 342, 386. In the interest of time, we will simply suggest in passing that much more could be done from
a Freudian perspective concerning the (omnipresent) motif of parricide as it relates to democracy in
nineteenth-century French history, politics, and literature.
64
E. Caro, “L’idolâtrie de la révolution,” in ibid., p. 356
65
Remark that with this tour de force metaleptical switching of cause and effect, de Pontmartin pulls off
the rhetorical trick par excellence of the political right in the aftermath of the Commune: i.e., he conflates
the defeat of France at the hands of the Prussian army (admittedly, a much better comparative for the
“barbarians” to which he refers in his article) with the Commune itself, which was historically and perhaps
causally an effect of the disastrous military adventurism of the Second Empire and the aristocratie de la
finance. The reference to the sack of Rome is, in itself, a reactivation of counter-revolutionary discourse
from the 1790s, when the neologism “vandaliser” was first coined. Cf., Patricia Ferguson, Paris as
Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1994), p.
12.
66
A. de Pontmartin, “Le Cosmopolitisme révolutionnaire et ses doctrines en France,” ibid., p. 387.
 62

the level of the analysis of race and biopolitics laid out in Society Must Be Defended –

between disciplinary and biopolitical regimes of power. The child is to be disciplined and

kept under the watchful gaze of any number of relaying apparatuses of power under the

former, and the invading barbarian, which by the end of the nineteenth century

constitutes the metaphorical cortex of a series of discourses of (in)security, is an at once

internal and external threat to the survival of the “race” that must be regulated and, in

final analysis, eliminated. Ultimately, what emerges from the discourse of the classes

dangereuses in the early part of the nineteenth-century, or the “disease of democracy”

from the latter half, is an ominous portent pointing towards the disasters of the twentieth

century; what emerges is a kind of ineluctable biopolitical logic, complete with the

“cruel” but “necessary” laws of shooting civilians designated variably as criminals,

microbes, and apes in order to ensure civilization’s survival. Indeed, at the risk of over-

simplifying an extremely intricate problem, we might argue that important aspects of

modern French anti-Semitism, specifically its tendency to colonize and militarize the

discourses of medicine, anthropology, and of the Nation (i.e., History), genealogically

owes much to the configurations and strategies of anti-worker and anti-democratic

discourse in nineteenth-century France. The object of this discourse shifts with the

eventual solidification of the Third Republic, with the mauvais ouvrier of yesterday

displaced in favor of today’s “Jew”. In practical terms, what post-1870s French culture

and discourse inherits from the Commune is not merely the “thanatopolitical” venom of

the myriad de Pontmartins of post-Franco-Prussian War France, not merely a newly

reconfigured anti-Semitism (though that would have been enough). France, and indeed

Europe, also inherits what we commonly call today the “war crime”. The most plausible
 63

explanation, for instance, of the savage nature of the repression of the Commune is the

hypothesis that, tacit or explicit approval from civilian authorities aside, the provisional

government of France might have actually lost control over its military for a week.67 In

other words, the army was left to its own devices, and proceeded to kill civilians merely

for being who they were. What the Commune seems, then, to have bequeathed to French

politics at the fin-du-siècle is a dangerously polyvalent discourse of biopolitics, an

organic vision of the “Nation” rooted in blood and soil,68 and a fetishized military

(betrayed by the “Other”) with which French politics will continue to flirt as a solution to

the upheavals of democracy well beyond the nineteenth century itself.

What follows from this imaginary and epistemic shift is a concomitant shift in the

status of the cabaret – a shift which, perhaps not coincidentally, also tends to follow the

same auto-contradictory arguments that hold that, although working-class politics is

essentially pathological, the disease of democracy, the cabaret is basically where an

explosive mix of politics and drink meet up with disastrous effects – where the bourgeois

body politic and the nation is shattered and dissolved by the encounter with the raw

antagonism of class difference, of its own internal, elementary, and inassimilable

difference.

But what, then, was the imaginary status of the cabaret prior to the Paris

Commune, that is, around the time that Rimbaud wrote “Au Cabaret-vert”? Definitively

answering this question is an excessively complex task, one which, at the level of both

historiography and ethics, requires us to add as a kind of caveat that there’s perhaps no

one way to really exhaust the question, that is, to reconstruct and to catch a glimpse of

67
Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
68
And this tendency crosses personal politics: where, for example, is the difference between de
Pontmartin’s Laboremus and the conclusion to Zola’s Débâcle?
 64

how the long-dead imagined the structures of their everyday existence question given the

kinds of documents we dispose. In any case, we must wonder to what extent our own

theoretical constructions distend documentary descriptions of the cabaret, to say nothing

of the fact that one cannot compare such descriptions to an extra-discursive, nineteenth-

century bar. Nevertheless, we can infer that there were at least two divergent views, or

valences, of the Cabaret in the years prior to the Commune. There is what we might call

the “disciplinary” trope of the Cabaret as a place of perdition, of ivrognerie and working

class immorality. Indeed, as we argued above, this view constitutes something of a lieu-

commun, a cliché in a variety of moralizing discourses – from the main-stream press69 to

the études sociales of a Louis-Mathurin Christophe-Moreau70 to the popular series of

tableaux parisiens known as the Français peints par eux-mêmes – that is best understood

in the context of the emergence of what Roddy Reid has called the normative discourse

of familialism.71 In the discursive context of “familialism,” the cabaret functions as a site

which produces and authorizes, through the production of an imagined and imaginary

working-class deviance, a set of norms which take as their grounded center the bourgeois

family and inscribe the “truth” of the working-class as a lack, as an abnormality, as a

marginal position in relation to the bourgeois norm. This discourse is best understood as a

deployment of what Michel Foucault conceptualizes as disciplinary techniques of power.

In a 1977 interview, Foucault reminds us that the role of such a discursive strategy was

not limited to that of epistemic regulation (even if one of its primary effects could be said

69
See, for example, the journal La Gazette des Tribunaux, or indeed, for the period prior to the Second
Empire, the working-class journals L’Atelier and the Rûche populaire.
70
See for example the third volume (Les peuples modernes) in his massive study, Du problème de la
misère et de sa solution chez les peuples anciens et modernes (Paris : Guillamin et compagnie, 1854). See
also, H.A. Frégier, op. cit.
71
See especially the introduction to his Families in Jeopardy, op. cit., pp. 23-63.
 65

to be the authorization of valid statements about what counts as “normal” behavior,

subjects, etc.). Quite to the contrary, and somewhat exceptionally for this “crab-like”

thinker who (in)famously refused to be conceptually pigeon-holed, Foucault argues that

what is at stake in disciplinary discourse, and specifically with respect to working-class

“deviance” (ivrognerie, absenteeism from the workplace, habit of frequently changing

domiciles without paying the rent, the practice of concubinage, etc.), is a consolidation of

power the aim of which is to “ensure domination”: “(…)[O]ne can say that the strategy of

moralizing the working class is that of the bourgeoisie. One can even say that it’s the

strategy which allows the bourgeoisie to be the bourgeoisie and to exercise its

domination.”72

Thus, the “cabaret,” such as it is (re)presented in bourgeois discourse, can be

situated and understood as, on the one hand, a phantasmagorical mystification, and, on

the other, as a disciplinary trope deployed to consolidate a series of social norms and

socio-economic power. In sum, it is a key component of the attempt to “discipline” the

working-classes, to produce “docile bodies” adapted to the mode of production of

industrial capitalism, conforming to its rigorous spatio-temporal and normative

exigencies. Seen in this manner, the crusade against l’ivrognerie in disciplinary discourse

is not just a biopolitical program concerned with the relative problems of population

health. The real aim of such a program, and by corollary the real valence of the cabaret in

this discourse, is that of subjectivation:73 producing as an effect of this discourse a labor-

72
Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh: a Conversation with A. Grosrichard, G. Wajeman, J.A.
Miller, et. al.,” in Power/Knowledge: Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, C. Gordon, ed. (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 203. My italics.
73
For Foucault, this term can refer to the modes by which disciplinary technologies of power produce
normed subjects. The sense in which Foucault understands “subjectivation” is thus not conceptually
proximate to the Rancièrian deployment of the concept, namely., as the emergence of a dissensual subject
of politics, an understanding which is closely aligned with our own.
 66

pool whose energy is not dissipated by leisure, is relatively stable, ideologically identifies

with the dominant class, from which, in a word, a maximum profit can be extracted. As

Alain Cottereau puts it, citing Denis Poulot’s pamphlet on working-class indiscipline, the

nexus of capitalism and disciplinary power is especially visible in the cabaret:

Outside the workshop, keeping body and family together are the only types of efforts to
be tolerated. But, beyond the workshop and family time, the employers cannot allow for
more than a minimal amount of time for rest and recuperation. This is the real source of
the employers’ anti-alcohol stance. (…) In Le sublime, immorality is measured in exact
proportion to the amount of time the workers take away from their paid employment and
their family (…). ‘Holy Mondays’ and its libations is a kind of challenge to the orderly
working of industry. It is a kind of intermittent mutiny (…).74

In fact, part of the delicious irony of the role that cabarets, cafés, and various

wineshops played in the creation of a collectivity with a distinct consciousness – that is,

the role they played in both the subjectivation of the working class and the reproduction

of social relations based on class difference – has to do simultaneously with basic

material question such as access to food and housing. Both were, as David Harvey

demonstrates, severely restricted for working-class families under the Second Empire,

whose average annual wages (for a healthy couple where both adults and whatever

children they might have were employed) would approach 2000 francs, at least 350 of

which be devoted to rent in one of the new working-class neighborhoods in Belleville or

Batignolles.75 The problem of course was that such housing – the creation of which was a

direct result of the modernization/gentrification of Paris known as l’Haussmannisation –

was both expensive for working-class budgets (as landowners there insisted on the same

8% return on their capital as those in the fashionable districts of le nouveau Paris) and

cheaply, poorly, and quickly constructed (using bricks). Few households, for example,

74
A. Cottereau, “ Denis Poulot’s Le Sublime… ,” op. cit., p. 116.
75
David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 197.
 67

had kitchens, much less dining rooms. The result of this was of course the creation of a

kind of ad hoc community in the place of the old one that had been wiped out along with

the vestiges of medieval Paris: “Sheer lack of space (…) [f]orced eating and drinking into

the cafés and cabarets, which consequently became collective centers of political

agitation and consciousness formation.”76 Indeed, the very conditions of the consolidation

of capitalism (e.g., wage depression, suburbanization of the working-classes and industry,

real-estate bubbles, etc.), and of the economic and political power of the bourgeoisie,

under the Second Empire were constantly in direct dialectical relation to the emergence

of pockets of oppositional discourse and collective senses of identity. As Harvey puts it,

“[C]abarets (…) provided the premises for the elaboration of scathing criticism of the

social order and plans for its reorganization.” He also mentions the case of Eugène Varlin

(who would go on to be an elected member of the Commune) and Nathalie Lemel, who

formed a food co-op that served the dual purpose of providing cheap, nutritious meals to

workers and their families, and as a foyer for political opposition.77

Going to the cabaret, then, is a kind of wild-card for disciplinary power – a place

where the very logic of the bourgeois economy and industrial discipline is quite simply

negated. Jules Vallès cracks open the door of a mid-century cabaret, and gives us a sense

of what it might have been like to make the banal gesture of entering a café where

ordinary people are drinking, singing, talking:

Après avoir pataugé toute la journée dans la boue – jusqu’au cœur – ils viennent là
s’enfoncer dans la discussion jusqu’au cou, faire brûler leur petit verre et flamber leurs
paradoxes ; montrer qu’eux, les mal chaussés, les mal vêtus, ils en valent bien d’autres,
‘ils ont quelque chose là.’ Les vaincus du matin deviennent les vainqueurs du soir (…)
Au café la joie, l’oubli, le rire et les chansons.78

76
Ibid., p. 200.
77
Ibid., pp. 201-02.
78
Jules Vallès, Les Réfractaires (Paris : Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1913), p. 22.
 68

And indeed, as a young Marx put it in 1844 (that is, at nearly the exact same

moment that Frégier was underscoring the problem of free-time amongst the working-

classes and the danger that it posed for maintaining social discipline in the city),79 the

cabaret is the place where the worker enjoys a more or less vacant, empty time, a

temporality wholly opposed to the “working day” that Marx dissects in the 10th chapter of

Capital I. The cabaret is thus a space of “reprehensible luxury” for capitalism, where one

“eat[s], drink[s], and read[s] books”; where one “think[s], love[s], theorize[s], sing[s],”

and where one perhaps has less (money, capital, discipline, etc.) but is more.80 It’s this

same banal and poetic space of the everyday, which Zola manages render with

impressionistic perfection in Germinal,81where unexpected encounters and unpredictable

alliances take place and are sealed over a round of beer. According to the historian of

working-class literature, Michel Ragon, the cabaret “joua un grand rôle (…) dans la

diffusion au sein du prolétariat des utopies romantiques (…) [un lieu où l’on] n’ignor[ait]

pas l’exploitation de [sa] classe, et n’hésit[ait] pas à la souligner.”82

As Alain Cottereau demonstrates in his study of working-class politics in the two

years preceding the fall of the Empire, with respect to public meetings in Paris, “there

could be between 15,000 to 25,000 people at meetings on any one evening.”83

Furthermore, although the police of the Second Empire attempted to impose a system of

regulating what kind of topics could be debated in public through a system of fines levied

79
H.A. Frégier, Des Classes dangeureuses …, op. cit., pp. 219-240
80
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, R. Tucker,
ed. (New York : W.W. Norton and Co., 1978), pp. 95-6.
81
I wonder sincerely if there isn’t an onomastic motivation behind the name Mme Désire, the woman who
runs the cabaret where Etienne and Chaval forge a deal that leads to collective action in Germinal, op. cit,
pp. 154-7. For at the end of the Second Empire, and indeed beyond, the cabaret is an indispensable site for
the elaboration of class identity and politics, both of which were articulated as much, if not more so, along
imaginary as libidinal lines. (For what is ideology if not a system for eliciting desire?)
82
Alphone Violet, Les Poètes du peuple au XIXe siècle, M. Ragon, ed. (Genève : Slatkine, 1980), pp. iii-ix.
83
Alain Cottereau, “Le Sublime…,” op. cit., p. 163.
 69

first against the speakers and then, in a kind of imitation of press censorship, against the

owners of the cabaret cum meeting-hall, “these meetings rapidly changed character,

[with] workers impos[ing] their own methods of discussion.”84 They thus took on an

aspect of democratic theorization, of political debate, of a collective re-imagining of what

kinds of social relations are possible that reminds us that, in some sense, Marx wasn’t

joking when he wrote that the less one works, the more one can theorize: “Ideas about

society, its history and its future were put to the test on the public platform, and were

instantly approved or disapproved by the audience with applause or boos.”85 These

meetings, for the most part held in the same places where politics were debated and

discussed over a newspaper when the right of assembly was still forbidden – that is,

wherever and however it could: in those sites par excellence of vagabond speech that

were the dance-halls, cafés-concerts, theaters, wineshops and cabarets.86

From a theoretical perspective, literature and the space of the cabaret share an

affinity: quite like literature, the “cabaret” is a figure of, and poses a problem to the

extent that it figures a kind of sidestepping of the mundane tyranny of discipline and

work, a way of slipping out of the totalizing regulation of the child, the worker (or indeed

whoever passes over into it). The cabaret is a site of provisional individual and collective

esthetic and political formations, where a “communauté aléatoire” comes together in the

form of “ [des] collectifs d’énonciation qui remettent en cause la distribution des rôles,

des territoires et des langages – en bref, de ces sujets politiques qui remettent en cause le

84
Ibid.
85
Ibid.
86
Alain Faure, “The Public Meeting Movement…,” op. cit., 208. See also, T.J. Clark, The Painting of
Modern Life, op. cit., p. 53.
 70

partage donnée du sensible.”87 More than a location, or a topology, it is a non-lieu of the

given partage du sensible– etymologically, a utopia: that is to say, “une reconfiguration

polémique du sensible, qui brise les catégories de l’évidence”.88

III. À propos of nothing – Rimbaud and the evidence of the common

Rien de plus commun que d’être: c’est l’évidence de l’existence.

Rien de moins commun que l’être: c’est l’évidence de la communauté.89

At first glance, “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir,” appears to be a poem so

deliberately banal and unremarkable that it comes close to becoming disarmingly naïve,

if not a little devoid of interest. One is tempted, indeed, to remark, as its most remarkable

aspect that absolutely nothing takes place here (in this respect, we are close to the

provocatively erotic poetic economy of one of Rimbaud’s earliest poems, Sensation):

there’s the echo of a voyage, the fatigue of the road travelled, a moment of lazy repose

lasting as long as it takes a beautiful servant girl to bring something to eat and drink.

Structurally, we are thrust into this text, as though with a parodically malicious wink, as

into an epic, that is, in medias res. The subject matter is, stricto sensu, inconvenient, if

not inappropriate: it seems more than a little unbecoming of the serious subject matter

called for by the sonnet, unbefitting of the pomp and circumstance that the alexandrine

demands.

And yet, within this very simplicity there is a kind of revolutionary undoing, a

radical gesture of rendering inoperable of poetic norms that fastidiously subverts and

manages to send tremors throughout the normative conventions of the dominant esthetic

87
Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), p. 64.
88
Ibid.
89
Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990), p. 225.
 71

regime in this period of the fin d’Empire. The “nothing” that the poet puts into play here

is the operator of what I would like to conceptualize as a poetic

“profanation” – that is to say, the scandalous symbolic practice which consists in making

an undignified use (“un usage indigne”)90 of the “sacred” precisely by restoring, or

reinscribing, the sacred within the domain of the common, the everyday. The analysis

that follows therefore attempts to draw out of this mise en scène of the everyday an

esthetico-political operation that is as subtle as it is dramatic, as unremarkable as it is

shattering. If, as T.J. Clark has argued, one of the preconditions for establishing the

hegemony of capitalism in the nineteenth century is the radical transformation, if not

eradication, of the everyday, then it is theoretically valid to posit the esthetic re-

valorization of the quotidian in “Au Cabaret-vert” as an anticipation of the coming

upheavals in Rimbaud’s oeuvre (if not in French poetry) and as an important instance of

symbolic resistance to capitalism’s insidious transformation of the collective formations

of social life.91 Such a reading ultimately allows us to catch a glimpse of something like

the relationship between Rimbaud’s early verse work and, its situation of enunciation in

the pre-Commune cultural, historical and political upheavals in France – a glimpse of the

relation between text and context. For it is in fact already in this very early series of

works, in the textual production of the late-Summer and Autumn of 1870 that Rimbaud

begins to undermine the very foundations of French verse poetry; it is well before, that is,

90
Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris, 1872-77), s.v. “ profaner ”.
91
As Clark puts it, the spectacular logic of nineteenth-century capital in Paris condensed in the universal
exhibitions and the emergence of the grands magasins (both coextensive, obviously, with the dramatic
urbanization project known as Haussmannization) can be analyzed in the following terms: “nothing much
could be allowed to exist apart from capital – certainly not the motives and appearances of people in their
daily, humdrum reproduction of themselves. People must have their forms and values [i.e., their ideas]
provided for them, manufactured elsewhere (…). There must be no everyday life any longer; or, rather, that
life must be made a matter of consumption as opposed to ‘industry’…” T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern
Life, op. cit., p. 68.
 72

the carnage of the Commune’s repression that Rimbaud begins to irreparably dissolve the

epistemological division maintaining a gap between the spheres of the esthetic and the

quotidian. 92

To begin, then, I’d like to pick up and comment upon the formal dérèglements

which give this sonnet something of a limp, but which also, ipso facto, manage to evolve

the form that Victor Hugo once called a “grand niais”.93

In particular, I’d like to focus on two subversive procedures that problematize the

structural stability of the sonnet and of the alexandrine, notably, the persistent and

audacious recourse to internal, external, and interstrophic enjambment, and the

destabilization of the caesura, that is, the sixth syllabic position dividing a dodecasyllabic

line of verse into two halves of six syllables each. Now, it would of course be incorrect to

claim that either one of these non-semantic techniques for producing meanings in verse

poetry were unheard of in the poetic tradition of the nineteenth century. In a certain

respect, they were arguably integrated into the very architecture of verse poetry. Rather,

I’d argue that the innovative and specifically subversive character of their deployment by

92
Here, I distance myself somewhat from Daryl Lee, for whom, the moment of the Commune and its
repression represents a point of no-return in both Rimbaud’s corpus and, in extenso one might infer, French
verse. See, Daryl Lee, “Rimbaud’s Ruin of French Verse: Verse Spatiality and the Paris Commune Ruins,”
Nineteenth Century French Studies, 32:1-2 (Fall-Winter, 2003-4), p. 73. For an excellent discussion on the
distinction between the everyday in Baudelaire and the everyday in Rimbaud, see Ross Chambers,
“Rimbaud forain: à propos de ‘Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir’,” in Parade Sauvage: revue d’études
rimbaldiennes, hommage à Steve Murphy (Octobre, 2008), pp. 328-9.
93
We shall simply note, for the time being and before discussing the importance of the alexandrine in 1870,
that Rimbaud’s intention is perhaps less to “reform” the alexandrine than to, as he is purported to have said
to the master of Parnassus himself, do away with it altogether. On 16 May, 1871 (that is, nearly a year to
the day after the crushing of the Commune), de Banville writes in Le National, a propos of the painting
known as Le Coin de table, that in it one can find a portrait of “M. Arthur Raimbaut [sic], un tout jeune
homme, un enfant de l’âge de Chérubin (…) qui m’a demandé un jour s’il n’allait pas être bientôt temps de
supprimer l’alexandrin!,” in Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres Complètes, op. cit., p. 411. The alexandrine, and
especially in the form of the sonnet was, above all, the very signifier of the sophistication of French poetry,
as is evidenced by the pride of place it occupies in de Banville’s own Petit traité de poésie française or,
later on, in Brunetière’s Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIXe siècle. See, Ferdinand
Brunetière, L’Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIXe siècle, T. II (Paris: Hachette, 1910), pp.
269-73.
 73

Rimbaud resides in the very fact that these poetic devices relied, in order precisely to be

legible as poetic devices as such, upon the relative rarity of their presence. Or, as de

Banville put it in a typically unintentionally ironic moment of his Traité: “[L]a règle est

une chaîne salutaire qu’il faut bénir.”94 In fact, as this is a question to which I shall return

later in a discussion of the sonnet “Le Dormeur du Val,” it is worth pointing out now that

the presence and frequency of these procedures of textual disruption lead one to the

conclusion that even if there exists a kind of “tradition of subversion,” or a kind of

permissive indiscipline when it comes to the deployment of such poetic techniques,

Rimbaud subverts – perhaps from the very beginning of his entry into French letters –

this very tradition by taking à la lettre, and indeed surpassing, Hugo’s injunction of

dislocating the alexandrine and letting language “d’en bas” intermingle with forms of

quality.95

In a second movement, I believe it will be necessary for us to interrogate the

symbolic economy of the poem – its space and the subjectivities that it renders up to be

seen and heard – in order to establish the relation between the poem and what I would

like to call a democratic “profanation”.

IV. How to Make Poor Use of an Alexandrine

The alexandrine isn’t merely a product of history and a form of esthetic thought

(it’s perhaps more, as Rimbaud illustrates in his systematic structural disruptions of it, an

un-thought). In the textual production of the année terrible, it also happens to be the

94
Théodore de Banville, Petit traité de poésie française (Paris : Charpentier, 1891), p. 197. See also, Daryl
Lee, op. cit., pp. 75-6.
95
Victor Hugo, “Quelques mots à un autre,” in Les Contemplations (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 75.
Indeed, this question of “ langage d’en bas ” will be an important one for considering the relation of this
text to its intertexts, but also for apprising the scope of Rimbaud’s poetic revolution in late 1870.
 74

predominant form in which Rimbaud writes, making it the privileged field and target of a

revolt against a hegemonic order that is perceived simultaneously in its social and

discursive dimensions.96

What’s more, as Jacques Roubaud reminds us, right up until the very end of the

nineteenth century, the alexandrine is the poetico-metric form par excellence of French

poetry: it is the “étalon de toute expression en cette langue, prose ou vers.” It is, to come

back to the question of its genealogy, a form that is first attested at the end of the twelfth

century in the Roman d’alexandre: a chanson de geste (the gestus being, generically, the

recounting of the acts of war) celebrating the military exploits of the Emperor Alexander

the Great. Michèle Acquien further points out that this form, which at first was a mode of

apprehending European political history (with Alexander being a metonym of

Charlemagne), is intimately linked another instance of political power that historically

grounded and legitimated the another – the theological.97 It is, historically speaking, the

verse form of God and Emperors (as Hugo put it in Hernani, “ces deux moitiés de Dieu,

le pape et l’empereur!”) – a site for the sedimentation of knowledge-power, or the

sylleptic intersection where cannons cross the canon.

In the interest of better taking stock of the converging esthetic and political

paradoxes of this text, I would like to briefly rehearse the rules that pertain most

immediately to the poem and that constitute what we might call the alexandrine’s

normativity. In a word, despite the (important, if not revolutionary) innovations

concerning the use of enjambment, a certain lyrical discipline required that its use within

96
See Michel Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud (Paris : Jose Corti, 2005), p. 32.
97
Jacques Roubaud, La Vieillesse d’Alexandre: essai sur quelques états récents du vers français (Paris :
Maspero, 1978), pp. 7-9. Michèle Acquien, Dictionnaire de poétique (Paris : Librairie Générale Française),
p. 44. Acquien points out that the alexandrine was frequently employed in hagiographic epics at about the
same period.
 75

and at the end of lines of verse nevertheless be kept to a minimum necessary to produce a

semantic and phonetic effect that adds to the harmony of the whole rather than overly

perturbing the syntaxico-semantic unity of the verse or stanza. The “purity” of the

caesura had likewise been policed by an entire ensemble of rules dating from the classical

period of versification that lasted right up until the 1860s-70s, when these norms began to

unravel, including under the pens of writers associated with Le Parnasse Contemporain

such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Verlaine, and Victor de Laprade.98 The most pertinent of

these rules are, grosso modo, the following: 1) always place at the sixth position sememes

that are syntactically and phonetically stressed (e.g., verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.); 2)

never place a monosyllable (and especially not one ending in a mute e/[]: e.g., je) at the

caesura; 2b) a stress on masculine caesuras (i.e., the final accentual position of the first

syllabic segment should fall on a “masculine” vowel, that is, any vowel other than []; if

this feminine vowel does appear in a post-tonic position, it is elided ); 3) respect

syntagmatic unity (e.g., one mustn’t split a subject from its predicate); and (4) finally,

never break up the semantic unity of a word by letting the caesura “intervenir dans un

mot.” There is, according to Roubaud and Gouvard, a kind of general minimization, if not

“éviction des césures enjambantes (…)” from the domain of the lyrical.99

And one cannot dispose of one’s rhymes in any old fashion! We’ll notice here

that, on the level of the most minimal architecture of poetry as such (i.e., the rhyme

scheme, which for de Banville was the very “secret” of poetry itself),100 something quite

remarkable has taken place with regard to the arrangement of rhymes in this sonnet: the

rhymes are crossed, there are four rhymes within the quatrains, and the only “regular”

98
Cf., Jean-Michel Gouvard, op. cit., pp. 120-5.
99
Jacques Roubaud, La Vieillesse…, op. cit., p. 21. Gouvard, ibid., pp. 120-3.
100
See the passage on rime in his Petit traité, op. cit., p. 47.
 76

rhyme after the pli, or the semantically and structurally all-important volta, of the sonnet

is between the first and second line of the first tercet. Anodyne as it may seem, what

we’re dealing with here is an “irregular” sonnet, or more precisely, a libertine sonnet – a

poetic form for which Théodore de Banville prescribed a parsimonious use in order to

produce an “effet special”.101

As a matter of fact, as Michel Murat has demonstrated, if we take a closer look at

the sonnets that Rimbaud wrote in 1870, we’d be hard pressed not to come to the

conclusion that they aren’t all a little bit “special” to the extent that nearly every one of

them follows a systematic rule of deviating from the normative poetic criteria of the age.
102
Down to the last one, they’re nearly all “irregular” sonnets. (One can scarcely imagine

the impatience of a de Banville when faced with such lyrical libertinage, he who, despite

his clear admiration for Baudelaire, nevertheless lamented the poet’s recurrent use of

“irregular” sonnets in Les Fleurs du mal.)103 Before we even begin reading the poem we

are confronted with a formal subversion of poetic order that anticipates its own

systematic internal destabilization (i.e., the thresholds of the alexandrine), and that

contaminates the lyrical with a satirical, disenchanted, critical form of poetic freedom

(that of the libertine) – a supplement that misappropriates the lyrical, that perverts it, but

that, in doing so, also makes it paradoxically all the richer (to the extent that the
101
Ibid., pp. 196-98. See also, Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 200. In the 18th century this rhyme
scheme was frequently employed in sonnets de libertinage, or poems which often tended less towards the
description of unorthodox sexual activity and more toward denying the existence of God, though the two
were never mutually exclusive.
102
This, to the extent that, as Michel Murat argues, “le point fondamental qui définit le sonnet comme
forme fixe n’est pas le mètre mais,” the disposition of the rimes in the quatrains according to the
“canonique : abba ” schema. Ibid. De Banville is even more rigorous in his assessment, adding that the
rimes in the tercets must hew to a very specific scheme in order to be considered as normative. Banville,
op. cit., p. 196.
103
“N’est-il pas étrange que le grand poëte Charles Baudelaire ait fait un Sonnet irrégulier, précisément
pour affirmer la divine beauté de la règle ? ” The poem in question, for which he is rather monumentally, or
willfully, missing the point of how the poet aligns himself with satanic rebellion, is Le Rebelle. See,
Banville, op. cit., p. 198.
 77

irregularity in the disposition of the homeoteleutons, i.e., the terminal rhyme pairs,

permits a wider range of phonetic couplings to be expressed).104

Let’s take a closer look, then, at the poem in question, at this sonnet in crisis. In

the very first line of verse, we find a delightfully strange phenomenon that we might

consider the text’s becoming-flesh: to the extent that it rips apart the unity of the

participial syntagma (j’avais – déchiré), the caesura mimetically reproduces the tearing

apart of the poet’s bottines, both performing within the poetic apparatus itself the action

described and insisting on that happy “tearing away” that consists in escaping from the

disciplinary environment of the maternal foyer and from the town of Charleville (“ville

supérieurement idiote”) in order to enter into the realm of the senses and jouissances.105

This disruption at the heart of the alexandrine (and in the very first line of verse) will

merely become more radical, more systematic as the text goes on. The same holds for the

playful mise en abyme effect by which the poem repeats or doubly imitates the “diegetic”

action of the text, actions for which the poet is frequently presented as both the agent and

the object (hence the importance of the pronominal verbs). This meta-discursive play is

pursued, for example, in the second line of the poem right down to the very minimal units

of language. In effect, if we decompose into its constituent vowels the prepositional

phrase “aux cailloux,” we get something of a comical performance from language itself:

of the ecstatic jouissance of freedom (Au = Oh!), and at the same time an onomatopoeic

evocation of the road to freedom as an ethos, a painful work of/on the self, a via dolorosa

104
And this lyrical libertinage, as Michel Murat sign-posts, situates the sonnets of 1870-71 in a fairly strict
hypotextual rapport with Les Fleurs du mal. Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 199.
105
Indeed, this paranomastic passage from Charleville to Charleroi also adheres to the larger logic of
subversion (of discipline, of borders, etc.) which continuously reproduces itself throughout the text. It is
perhaps in this sense that we might best explain the transformation that underwent the actual, extra-poetic
sign of the inn where the poet triumphantly orders his tartines Indeed, the “Maison verte,” with its
connotations of domestic, sedentary, bourgeois economy becomes the much more allusive “Cabaret vert,”
a question to which we shall return further on.
 78

filled with rocks ready to tear one’s feet (metrical or otherwise) to shreds (aill- = aïe!).

The same mimetic playfulness ought to be noted for the homonyms jambon/jambes

which recurrently appear in every stanza of the sonnet, simultaneously making an

audacious use of a radically profane, everyday register of discourse in the space of the

lyrical and metaphorically “giving legs” (jambes can of course be heard as a homophonic

echo in jamb-on) to the poem which stretch themselves throughout the entire sonnet. In

an erotic twist to this becoming-flesh of the poetic text, we might add that we needn’t

take the route of apocope, we needn’t restrict our ears to hearing jambes: for jambons,

while metonymically designating the belle serveuse, also metaphorically, according to

Delvau’s Dictionnaire de la langue verte, refer to a woman’s thighs in working class

slang.106 Thus, we find in this sememe a highly compact subversion of the sonnet and,

ultimately of the sign itself: jambon not only belongs to a “vulgar” lexical field, its

repetition is stylistically transgressive, and its integrity is split in a play of dissemination

(jambon-jambes) that draws our attention to the gap between its linguistic identity and

difference (i.e., jambons, if deterritorialized into the domain of slang actually signifies

jambes).107

The phrase, aux cailloux, itself is in a position of external enjambment, or

“reject,” exactly like the openings in lines 4, 6, 7, 10, 13 – in which, significantly, the

more than slightly cacophonous sememe “d’ail” can be found in a kind of double, that is

106
Alfred Delvau, Dictionnaire de la langue verte (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1883), s.v., jambon.
107
As Walter Benjamin underscored in his study of Baudelaire, the reader of nineteenth-century lyric
poetry would do well to be attentive to such lexical anomalies precisely to the extent that in the early part
of the century “[l]a division du vocabulaire en mots qui semblaient se prêter à un style élevé et en mots à
exclure dominait toute la production poétique”. With Victor Hugo and, especially, Charles Baudelaire,
however, this esthetic distinction between the language of the everyday and that of the poetic “event”
begins to disintegrate, creating what Benjamin evocatively conceptualizes as a poetics of the “putsch” in
Baudelaire’s poetry that allows the philosopher to see in the latter an esthetic counterpart of Auguste
Blanqui. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, op. cit., pp. 143-5.
 79

structural and diacritic, isolation that recalls its ideologically motivated appearance in

“Les Reparties de Nina” – to say nothing of the enjambments (in contre-rejet) in lines 8

and 14. With respect to this clove of garlic sticking out like a sore poetic thumb in line

13, John Huston rightly if allusively pointed up that garlic is the kind of foodstuff that

simply wouldn’t be placed in a serious sonnet, mainly because it functions as a signifier

of what we might consider the material reality of working-class bodies.108 It is a kind of

negative index of the fundamental, perhaps traumatic, antagonism (i.e., class conflict) at

the base of nineteenth-century French society which cannot be symbolically elided or

practically resolved but only designated (as here in the sonnet form) within the fabric of

the symbolic. Not only is garlic a condiment serving to mask the odor or taste of rancid

meat (thus consumed solely by the poor) in the nineteenth century, it enters into the

increasingly pronounced divide amongst the bourgeois and working-classes around the

question of (domestic and individual) hygiene. More particularly, the presence of garlic

points to what Alain Corbin sees as the increasingly low threshold for tolerating foul

odors that, while stemming from advances in pre-Pasteurian medical science beginning in

the 18th century, becomes by the middle of the nineteenth century a kind of imaginary

metonymic marker of the bourgeoisie’s socio-economic ascension (to the extent that foul-

smelling bodies are, of course, proletarian bodies. To paraphrase Flaubert: on ne pue

jamais tout seul!).109

All in all, fully half of the sonnet itself is subject to some instance of structural

dislocation, the most scandalous instance of which might be found at the caesura in the

rhythmically anarchic line 3 of the poem: “Au Cabaret-vert: je – demandai des tartines.”

108
John Huston, The Design of Rimbaud’s Poetry, op. cit., pp. 25-7.
109
See Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 57-61, 134-5, and especially 142-60.
 80

Je is, of course, the furthest thing in grammatical terms from an accentually important or

stressed word (it’s a proclitic subject pronoun ending in a mute e, after all) and, to top it

all off, the caesura cleaves – the first of many cleavages, so to speak, that may have made

a poetic purist blush – the subject-verb pair in two.110

And what of this verb? Something about it, or at least its modality, strikes the

reader as immediately more than a little anachronistic. We might reasonably expect that,

as any third semester student of French might be able to tell us, the register of historic

rupture that the passé simple conveys and indeed discursively constructs simply fails to

coincide with the simple act of ordering a pair of ham and butter tartines. “Derrière le

passé simple, se cache un démiurge,” as Barthes put it before going on to insist that its

use, while signposting a certain semiotico-historical hierarchy, condenses within the

slender slits of a verb the dialectic of a social configuration’s past and potential, its à-

venir.111 What we’re dealing with, then, is a kind of scandalously anti-heroic poetic

counter-economy in which the very grammar of heroic discourse coincides with, or no

longer pushes out to its chiaroscuro margins, an act that could not be any more prosaic,

quotidian, or indeed infâme.112 Yet this very attempt to “héroïser le present” constitutes,

according to Foucault one of the fundamental postures of modernity. We might therefore

relate the species of “modernity” at work in Rimbaud’s 1870-71 production to the stance

110
Jean-Pierre Bobillot notes that this same syntagmatic subversion of the caesura can be found early on in
“Ma Bohème”: “Comme des lyres je – tirais les élastiques” (followed by an interverse enjambment, or
rejet). Cf., Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Rimbaud: le meurtre d’Orphée, crise de verbe et chimie des vers ou la
Commune dans le poème (Paris: Honoré-Champion, 2004), p. 58. See also Benoît de Cornulier, Théorie du
vers: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 303.
111
Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 26-27.
112
In the interest of clarity, I would also point out that I am borrowing from Foucault’s lexicon a particular
sense of the term infâme, which posits it as an ambivalent modality of the power/knowledge nexus which
emerges with modern techniques of power and subjectivation, and which subverts a prior notion of fama
(that is, of the worthiness of the lives of famous men to be recorded in/by discourse) in the act of according
to the “lives of infamous men” a place in discourse (whether it be in a lettre de cachet or a novel). See M.
Foucault, “La vie des hommes infâmes,” ibid., pp. 237-55.
 81

of critique proper to modernity that Foucault evokes in his analysis of Baudelaire and

Kant. Foucault conceptualizes the modernity of the Aufklärung as both a praxis and an

ethos, both an agency and an ontology, which delves into the present moment so as to

“l’imaginer autrement (…) non pas en le détruisant, mais en le captant dans ce qu’il est ;

(…) de rompre les règles dans l’acte de les faire jouer.” It is a question, then, of a

“liberté” that simultaneously “respecte [le] réel et le viole.”113 Indeed, one would be hard-

pressed to find a better formula for describing Rimbaud’s posture vis-à-vis the poetic

canon in 1870.

This playful “infamy,” or paradoxical rendering heroic of the prosaic intensifies in

the second stanza, where we find something like an inscription of the hedonistic pleasure

of the experience of one’s own body, of the body qua object of an autotelic pleasure, as a

corporeal site of varying intensities of pleasure in the experience of the self as an other.

Whence, the poet’s insistence on what we might think of as an oxymoronic passé simple

foregrounding in an epic dimension that tiny jouissance of stretching one’s legs. And yet,

at least within the context of nineteenth-century strategies of disciplinary power, we may

think of the stakes of stretching one’s legs in a cabaret as implying an act of resistance on

some level. The stakes of this quotidian gesture enjamb the pleasure of the self and

involve an experience of pleasure and alienation in order to form a kind of a priori

condition of emancipation (the alienation in play is thus not alienation of capitalism, but

the fundamentally split relation of the subject to itself). In fact, the very gesture of sitting

recalls to mind one of Barthes’ more suggestive passages from The Neutral. For him,

sitting (just sitting) is a radical posture of laziness that functions as a désoeuvrement of

113
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les lumières ?,” and “Pierre Boulez, l’écran traversé,” in Dits et Écrits
II, 1976-88 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 1041, 1388.
 82

the Judeo-Christian ethos of the West (along with a scathingly sarcastic critique of

capitalism and imperialism, such a project is, incidentally, at the theoretical heart of

Rimbaud’s later Une saison en enfer): “Sitting quietly, doing nothing = really means

putting oneself completely outside the universe of sin (…). [Sitting is] a completely

symbolic and completely efficient [posture], one that outstrips and exhausts the

symbolic.”114

In a similar optic, Slavoj Žižek argues that when one is faced with a moment of

crisis, one must resist the temptation to do anything at all that may contribute to salvaging

the system to which crisis inheres as a condition of operability. Indeed, though there

could not be two thinkers more dissimilar than Žižek and Barthes, for the former too

laziness is a form/discourse of refusal inscribed in the body and its enjoyment, a

localized, unpredictable act that actually can prohibit the “machine” (of capital, of labor,

of discipline, etc.) from functioning smoothly.115 Thus, there is something potentially

quite revolutionary in the adoption of a deliberate, one might say Rimbaldian laziness.

After all, in a letter to Georges Izambard after the out-break of the Franco-Prussian war,

Rimbaud elaborates a kind of ethical maxim in a moment of particularly inspired

sardonic brio: “ma patrie se lève!...moi, j’aime mieux la voir assise; ne remuez pas les

bottes! C’est mon principe.”116

Finally, Rimbaud continues to play with poetic form on multiple levels. The

sonnet is simultaneously a kind of fluid linguistic structure, a practice of symbolic

114
Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 185
115
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008) p. 216. Here, Žižek comes
close to echoing the great nineteenth century theorist of laziness, Paul Lafargue. In his 1883 pamphlet Le
Droit à la paresse, Lafargue calls the left’s dogmatic demand of the droit au travail a disastrously
pernicious effect of ideology which never can be as revolutionary as the demand of a right to laziness. Paul
Lafargue, Le Droit à la paresse (Paris: Editions Mille et une nuits, 1994).
116
Arthur Rimbaud, O.C., op. cit., pp. 330-1.
 83

reappropriation, revalorization, and inscription of social space, and a form of em-bodying

the flesh of words themselves. Note, for example, the transgressive (in the strict

etymological sense of the term) caesura in this fifth line of verse, which not only

separates the verb (allongeai) from its object (les jambes), but in doing so literally

stretches the poem’s “feet” (rhythmically) and legs (i.e., the poet’s jambes) across the

caesura’s cut, en-jambing it, so to speak. Indeed, the internal destabilizations at the

caesura in this text are practically systematic, giving us an immediate sense of the

considerable pressure to which Rimbaud submits the alexandrine in order to suspend its

norms, in order to render it désoeuvré. In fact, with the exception of the second line of

verse from the first stanza – which is suspiciously classical in its adherence to the rules –

we have before us an alexandrine that has something of a tendency to drag its feet!

V. L’Adorable, or Beauty Decanonized

“Et ce fut adorable…”

Before we can conclude our reading of this poem we must pause to consider the

central, feminine figure of desire in this text. For with this figure, Rimbaud proposes a

rather audacious counter-model to the Parnassian model of the beau, which, we’ll recall,

was best exemplified as a feminine statue. The adjective “adorable” marks the emergence

into the text of a somewhat overdetermined figure of feminine sexuality, namely, the

serveuse. There are, of course, numerous (legitimate) manners of analyzing the presence

of the serveuse. In both an allegorical and infra-textual perspective, we could see in her a

kind of profane continuation with the figure of La Cybèle, from a very early poem by

Rimbaud known variously as “Credo in Unam” (a text that the poet sent to de Banville in
 84

the early spring of 1870 and later revised as “Soleil et chair”) – for she too was

“gigantesquement belle,” and was endowed with a phantasmagorical “double sein

vers[ant] dans les immensités”.117 In a lateral perspective more oriented by a

psychoanalytical approach to the text, it’s of course not impossible to see in the figure of

the serveuse an intertextual echo with Baudelaire’s maternal “Géante”.118 Approached

thusly, she might instantiate the desire of the poet to return to a pre-mirror-stage phase of

imaginary fusion with the (semiotic) maternal body. The cabaret itself would thus be the

scene where the poet plays out a narcissistic fantasy of regression to a pre-castration

mode-of-being in a world purged of difference, in an absolute plenitude of happy,

undifferentiated and indeterminate self-sufficiency of self and desire.119 Such an

hypothesis seems sustainable the more one glances closely at the play of internal

“rejects” that tend to intensify around the caesura in line 8, which erotically and

poetically transform these “ tétons - énormes ” into breasts over which the gaze and the

tongue (provided one reads the poem out loud) linger. The enjambed caesura furthermore

actualizes a symbolic cleavage in the alexandrine, making the sonnet’s body

117
Arthur Rimbaud, “Credo in unam…” in O.C., op. cit., p. 41.
118
“Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes; / Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes, / Et parfois
en été, quand les soleils malsains, // Lasse, la font s’étendre à travers la campagne, / Dormir
nonchalamment à l’ombre de ses seins, / Comme un hameau paisible au peid d’une montagne.” Or perhaps
even more suggestively, as Ross Chambers argues, one might look to the dizaine “Je n’ai pas oublié,
voisine de la ville…” from Les Fleurs du mal. Here, the poet fantasmatically reconstructs a paradisial, pre-
Oedipal era – prior to interruption of Colonel Aupick into the ménage – when the poet-child lived alone in
the countryside with his mother. Incidentally, the final image in this poem is that of a late-afternoon sun-
beam spilling over a table-cloth. See, Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p.
142 (and p. 53 for La géante). See also Ross Chambers, “On Inventing Unknowness: The Poetry of
Disenchanted Reenchantment (Leopardi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Justice),” French Forum 33:1-2 (Winter-
Spring, 2008), pp. 16-36.
119
See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience,” in Écrits, A Selection, Bruce Fink, translator (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co.,
2002), pp. 75-82; Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in General Psychological Theory:
Papers on Metapsychology, Philip Rief, ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 56-83 ; Idem, “The
Libido Theory and Narcissism,” in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, James Strachey, ed. (New
York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977), pp. 412-31.
 85

simultaneously masculine and feminine. This is to say nothing of the verbal syntagma

which reverses – or inverts (!) – unself-consciously heteromasculinist nineteenth-century

notions of the relations of agency and passivity between the masculine and the feminine:

“elle m’emplit”. Here, indeed, subjectivity and feminine plenitude are placed on the same

plane of paradoxical agency, namely, that of a mug of beer passively being filled, but

actively overflowing. The sonnet and the alexandrine thus provide a kind of spatial

framework and erotic economy for an infantile fantasy of harmonious integration with the

maternal body.

Nothing precludes such readings of the serveuse. However, I’d like to opt for a

different approach, and try to apprehend in the emergence of the serveuse the logical

prolongation of a veritable poetic profanation begun earlier in the text, as well as a

daringly defiant esthetic challenge to the alexandrine, the sonnet, and perhaps ultimately,

the lyric.

Let us begin with the alexandrine itself. If we glance a little closer at this moment

of the text, we might be taken aback by the outstanding syntactical complexity of this

syntagma which opens itself up at line 7…and continues until the end of the sonnet. It

stretches out over eight lines of verse (thus recalling, by an effect of what we might call

structural analepsis – i.e., a recall buried within the poetic structure of its genesis – the

eight days of vagabondage from the incipit), in effect covering half of the sonnet with the

erotic tension between the poet and the serveuse as well as complicating the very

principle of a stanza’s integrity if not the sonnet’s intelligibility. In the end, the subject is

so excruciatingly far from its verb(s) and their predicates, that it is almost as though the

entire action were taking place in slow-motion; as though our (the readers’) gaze hits the
 86

end of the poem, the end of the phrase narrating the action of the serveuse adorable, at

the precise moment that the dying sunbeam guilds (or, a doré) the froth on the glass of

beer before the poet. The extraordinary plasticity of time – which is perhaps the very

mode in which one phenomenologically experiences happiness as a kind of suspended

duration – in this text is indeed one of its most striking symbolic achievements. The poet

experiences, and, because of the structural and grammatical dislocations, we too

experience, a kind of confusion of diachrony and synchrony, a sort of becoming-space of

time and a becoming-time of space; of time becoming a utopic, or euchronic, space. In

this cabaret we slip into the non-spaces, or the non-time, of a happiness to-come, that, in

Rimbaud’s poetry, it is up to the poet to imagine, create and bring forth. In effect, as

Marie-Claire Bancquart underscores, in a formulation that resonates with Foucault’s

analysis of the critical ethos of modernity (i.e., as an ethical, epistemological and esthetic

“travail indéfini de la liberté”), Rimbaldian poetic space is that of a non-determined

liberty, that of the “l’euchronie et de l’utopie (…) à refaire sans arrêt à partir de l’espace

(…) et du temps”.120 This elaborate plasticity of the poem’s space-time, its vacant time,

constitutes not only a subversion of the poetic, but also of the very idea of telos in

historical narrative: the Cabaret’s scattered and meaningless time is the very opposite of

evolutionary, rectilinear, useful, disciplined, dominant time (or the time of the dominant

classes, rather). Conceptually it might be proximate to that congealing of an isolated

moment of history specific to, in its filling-out or overflowing of, the present moment that

Walter Benjamin describes, in the Theses on History. For Benjamin, such a temporality is

a “messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the

120
Marie-Claire Bancquart, Images littéraires du Paris ‘fin-du-siècle’ (Paris : Editions de la Différence,
1979), p. 30.
 87

fight for the oppressed” that exceeds time, filling the past with the “presence of the now,”

a quasi-magical eternal “now,” a nunc stans that “explodes the continuum of history”

quite precisely in the same way as a revolution. 121

“Et ce fut adorable…”

We know something of the affinity that the poet had for church Latin (and, if

academic prizes and early poems in Latin are any indication, we can surmise that

Rimbaud was a gifted Latinist). I think we might do well therefore to interrogate, given

the paronomastic insistence around the phonemes, with the “a-dor-able” slipping into the

synedochal signifier of the sun (d’or) in the last half of the poem, the possible meanings

of the adjective that is attached to the serveuse. For, prior to acquiring its modern,

hypocoristic, or diminutive, synonymy with “mignon,” “gentil,” etc., “adorable”

belonged to a religious ideolexical field of significations. Ad-orare, in Latin, denotes the

act of addressing oneself to the divine, to the sublime, to that which exceeds human

capacity for measure. “Adorer” is the very attempt to (take) measure (of), or to measure

oneself to, the incommensurable. And this detail leaves us with a very perplexing

predicament, or question: just what in the world is the adoration of a Belgian waitress?

The answer to this question is at least two-fold. On the one hand, what is at work

here is the kind of studious displacement of a symbolic structure for identifying and using

a received model, “Beauty,” the likes of which is probably only preceded by Gustave

Courbet’s Baigneuses. (Perhaps his Tableau de figures humaines, historique d’un

enterrement à Ornans is the more apposite precursor to the extent that it melds the

“grandeur of history painting – the highest form of painting” with a subject matter that is

121
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (Schoken: New York, 1968),
pp. 260-3.
 88

“low, vulgar, a bunch of villagers who don’t even have the dignity of peasants dressed in

traditional regional garb”.)122

Within the context of Rimbaud’s oeuvre, this “adoration of the serveuse” is an

isotopical transformation in the representation of the feminine which leads to the

technical and semiotic innovations of “Mes petites amoureuses” (by way of such

explicitly Communard texts as “Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie”). But here we have a first

instance of the poet using the sonnet in order to subtly but quite seriously put on equal

footing a well-endowed waitress and…a goddess. In itself, this constitutes a rather

audacious gesture, but it is important that we not reduce this re-evaluation of “Beauty” to

a mere, carnavalesque upending of romantico-parnassian models of “the Beautiful”. More

fundamentally than a temporary reversal of the high-low dichotomy, such a

decanonization of le Beau actually asserts this reversal as a new model, as a two-fold

transformation within the esthetic and the political itself. For this new figure of the

beautiful is indeed situated at the intersection of the erotic and the political: the serveuse

vehicles a twin desire to transform both esthetic norms and social relations, and in fact

posits as the condition of possibility for such a transformation a renovation in the esthetic

norms. That is, la serveuse figures a revolution in the norms that tend to fix, police,

regulate, and discipline what (and who) can be given to be seen and heard and in what
122
See the chapter on Courbet from Peter Brooks’ Realist Vision (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2005), p. 73. The problematic at the heart of the Courbet’s scandalously democratic depiction of the
“epic everyday” (homologous perhaps to Flaubert’s innovative use of indirect discourse) is very much
shared by this sonnet by Rimbaud. At base, the question, and problem for Courbet’s contemporaries, was
not merely whether or not subject and object managed to coincide, but, more radically, whether or not their
conjuncture didn’t simply pose a problem to the very possibility of apprehending the object (e.g., the
painting, the poem, the novel – we’ll recall that, according to Imperial Prosecutor Picard Madame Bovary
was not art but pornography – etc.) as art at all; whether what was represented should or could even be
considered as representable to begin with, and, if not, what happens then to “representation” is something
like its self-implosion or deconstruction. See Brooks, ibid., p. 76. See also Dominick Lacapra’s analysis of
the trial of Mme Bovary, Mme Bovary on Trial (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). See also Michael
Fried’s admirable study of Courbet’s work, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), esp. pp. 111-48.
 89

contexts – that govern the system of representational hierarchies in which the alexandrine

and the sonnet must be included.

Furthermore, within the mischievously deliberate accumulation of internal and

external enjambments of the poem, it is quite as though structural dislocation materializes

the poetic tension, the hesitation between accepting and rejecting the formal esthetic

model of lyrical poetry; it is as though the formal subversions and structural dislocations

exemplify the kinds of complex tensions between the literary and political hegemony as

the poem both reproduces what Jameson would call the political unconscious of its

historical context and produces fissures within that context in which narratives of

resistance can be articulated.123 In a similar vein, let us not neglect the poem’s hyper-

hypotaxical syntax, nor its use of a rhythm brutalized by incises and inter-strophic

enjambment. For in such disruptions in the dimension of intelligible totalities, we witness

a kind of overflowing of the poem’s own structural limits that mimetically engages with

and repeats the excess of the subjects represented within. The text becomes as

incommensurable (etymologically, that which exceeds measurement) as the characters

and scene that it puts into poetic discourse, recalling Rancière, for whom

incommensurablity is the very principle of political subjectivation and indeed of

democracy (for the latter is a principle of equality that cannot be measured against the

figure of a Subject that can be said to incarnate democracy).124

“Au Cabaret-vert” thereby stages and links together its own meta-textual, esthetic,

and political stakes in a critical reflection on, and rejection of, a postulate of the poetic

123
To paraphrase Marx, we might say that poets make their own poetry, but they do not make it just as they
please.
124
Jaques Rancière, interview with M. Potte-Bonneville et I. Saint-Saens, “Le Maître Ignorant,” in Et tant
pis pour les gens fatigués: Entretiens (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 125-8.
 90

tradition that, since Aristotle, proclaims the incompatibility of certain subjectivities with

certain esthetic forms.125 The poem is thus a form of poetic praxis, denaturalizing a

discursive configuration, produced at the conjuncture of the political and the esthetic,

which poses as the essential trait of the peuple (in the largest sense of the term) a

fundamental lack – that is, the peuple’s incapacity, for want of a comprehensible parole,

because of their symbolically and politically constructed infantia, to meaningfully

represent itself, as much in the domain of art as in the political.

The force of this poem resides in such displacement, in the esthetic and

ontological gap that the poet creates between the dire and the être, between

representation and the represented; it resides in the breach that the poet opens up at the

very heart of esthetic conventions, in the void constituted by all these insignificant

incommensurabilities of everyday life with which the poet fills his sonnet: slang, desire,

fatigue, the traces of modes and objects of production that have not been undone by the

alienation of capital (e.g., the tapisserie in line 7), the happiness of the contingent being-

together of the cabaret and so on. In this poem, the revolutionary act consists in plunging

not to the bottom of the abyss, but rather into the heart of the bistro in the hopes of

finding there a magnificent late-autumn, (“arriéré”) sunbeam illuminating the

metonymical froth of an extraordinary mug of beer.126

125
Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle (New York : The Modern Library, 1984), pp. 223-66. At
base, this is what Rancière refers to as la loi de lexis.
126
It could be interesting to see in this “ray of light” the deployment of a revolutionary solar metaphor
which traverses the century in political discourse. According to Adrian Rifkin, the solar imaginary at the
moment of the Commune constitutes something like a “phoneme” of (written and visual) political and
polemical discourse, as well as in popular art of the era (especially in songs sung in…cabarets and
guinguettes!). Indeed, a work dedicated to the analysis of these tropic suns in Rimbaud’s work from this
period would give us a slightly better, if still somewhat elusive, idea of the ways in which Rimbaud saw his
poetry as engaged in or affiliated with the revolutionary discourse of his day. See, Adrian Rifkin, “No
Particular Thing to Mean,” Block 8 (1983), p. 42; Jean Dubois, Le Vocabulaire politique et social en
 91

Let us conclude, then, with one final comment on language as an esthetico-

political profanation in “Au Cabaret-vert”. For, as we shall soon see, the democratic

distribution of language forms an important node connecting “Au Cabarert-vert” to “Les

Reparties de Nina”.

Let’s linger for a moment on that wonderfully perplexing incise-within-an-incise

at line 9, that irruption of a minor discourse127 that surges up at the very fold of the sonnet

(the transition from quatrains to tercets is seen as the most important part of a sonnet in

the nineteenth century): “Celle-là, ce n’est pas un baiser qui l’épeure”.

We should see, or hear, in the emergence of the language of the other into the

center of poetic discourse a sort of double destabilization. On the one hand, it operates a

dialectical and referential destabilization. “Celle-là, ce n’est pas un baiser qui l’épeure” is

reported discourse, but, in its effacement of what we call embrayeurs d’énonciation (no

graphic signs such as quotation marks, no antecedent or subsequent proposition, etc.) it

also shares a certain structural affinity with free indirect discourse. This single line of

verse, in other words, initially poses a significant challenge to its own legibility, making

the mapping of the subject of enunciation really quite impossible. Simultaneously,

though, this very difficulty contains its own commentary upon language that brings the

lyrical form of the sonnet down to the level of everyday language as a shared, communal

system for generating meanings about the experience of the world. It’s an instance of

what Mikhail Bakhtin calls heteroglossia: of difference symbolically inscribed as a trace

France de 1869 à 1872 à travers les œuvres des écrivains, les revues, et les journaux (Paris : Librairie
Larousse, 1962).
127
“Épeurer” is an Ardenno-Belgian sociolexical deviation from “standard” French. I thus employ the term
“minor” here rather in the sense elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in their work on Kafka. That is, not in
the sense of unimportant, irrelevant or immature, but rather as denoting the presence of an inassimilable,
marginalized element that disrupts and prevents a (linguistic, political, etc.) system from functioning
smoothly, unproblematically. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
 92

in the space of the “same,” of the language of the Other (preserved) in that of the self to

be sure. Would not this instance of free, indirect discourse, then, be a kind of a

metadiscursive operation signposting the fact that language, and indeed poetry, is always

already, and radically, inter-relational, indeed democratically en-rapport and en-

commun?128 What Rimbaud gives us to contemplate is, rather than the prison-house, the

cabaret of language: that is, language too is a site of encounters. It is the locus where not

only desires, but also torts, such as economic exploitation or political marginalization, are

symbolized, articulated, given visibility. It is the (non)site where affiliations and

antagonisms take on visibility and audibility, where the “silence” of the infans is

challenged. As Bakhtin once wrote, in a phrase ancipating Rancière’s propositions on the

radical equality of speaking beings, “celui qui appréhende l’énonciation d’autrui n’est pas

un être muet, privé de la parole, c’est au contraire un être rempli de paroles

intérieures”.129 In this single line of verse at the volta of an ostensibly unremarkable

sonnet, a turning point in French poetry is reached and the entire ethos of Parnassus – of

retraction from the concerns of the present, of the cult of the beautiful and the antiquated,

of disdain for the “populace” – is, I would argue, devastatingly rejected. In Rimbaud’s

pre-Commune cabaret, there reigns a fundamental, heteroglossic equality of beings

whose interiority is filled with statements, desires, and beer and tartines.

It is possible, and I would argue important, to think through this instance of

“heteroglossia” along the twin-axis of esthetics and politics, as might Jacques Rancière,

128
Is there not a strange and happy resonance between Bakhtin’s characterization of heteroglossia in
general and reported discourse specifically as the confusion of identity and alterity – “l’auteur se glisse
dans le discours de l’Autre” – with Rimbaud’s much cited dictum, je est un autre?. See, Mikhail Bakhtine,
Le Marxisme et la philosophie du langage: essai d’application de la méthode sociologique en linquistique
(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), p. 168.
129
Ibid., p. 165.
 93

and as indeed seems natural for a concept imported from a theorist as preoccupied with

the politics of the esthetic as Bakhtin. For Jacques Rancière, the plurality of idioms is a

given. Rather, he is preoccupied with the conjuncture of the esthetic and the political,

how their articulation renders possible the intelligibility of the sensible world,

determining how it gets apprehended, how its heteroglossic meanings are contested (his

“politics of literature” is thus not to be confused with some facilely reductive, pseudo-

totalitarian art of the ‘People’):

[I]l y a (…) à la base de la politique une “esthétique” (…). Les arts ne prêtent jamais aux
entreprises de la domination ou de l’émancipation que ce qu’ils ont de commun avec
elles: des positions et des mouvements de corps, des fonctions de la parole, des
répartitions du visible et de l’invisible.130

On a metatextual level, then, we might read Rimbaud’s “Cabaret” as a symbolic minoring

of verse poetry – as an overflowing of the poetic dire that actualizes and prolongs a

democratic play of writing and language that allows for a heterogeneous poetic dire(s) to

emerge, alongside a desiring-subject that has no business doing, being or saying anything

in a sonnet. The poem allows itself to be the forum where n’importe qui can share the

experience of poetry, where the response to the question “what counts as a poetic

experience?” is: everyday life counts.

On the levels of the content, form, and context, we have an encounter between the

hermeneutic and the poetic that renders the ordinary extraordinary. In a word, Rimbaud

puts before us a kind of philosophy of the raw immanence of existence, and of the

rudimentary happiness of “being-there”. Crucially, he poses this “being-there as an

instance of what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy theorizes as an en-commun, as a

130
Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible, op. cit., pp. 12-14, 25. Many contemporaries, indeed
including Jean-Luc Nancy, have mis-read Rancière on this point, contending that a politics of literature
logically implies a politics of totality, if not of totalitarianism.
 94

“being-together” that precedes the “being-there”.131 In Rimbaud’s cabaret, something

quite like what Nancy calls the banal phenomenology of disorganized being-together

emerges from the text. That is to say, Rimbaud chooses the cabaret as the scene where a

kind of community in suspense is staged as a collectivity whose relation is its non-

relation (i.e., its simple, contingent being-together in the space-time of existence, as

voyagers on a train, or in an auberge). In other words, nothing essential, no master

signifier, no grounded identity or metaphysics ties this community together in what

Nancy conceptualizes as a work (an oeuvre). Rather, the fragile tie that binds is the

question of potential identifications, of desires to be-together, exposed in common to

being as a phenomenon of relating to the Other and to the self, to the self as an other and

to the Other as a self (je, after all, being an autre).132 Rimbaud’s cabaret is perhaps at

base the staging of the ontological (and political) situation of “being-together”; it is the

site and scene of a poetic enunciation of being-together, of not just an un-worked

community, but a lazy community – that is, a radical neutralization of the regime, rules

and discipline of capital.133 In this philosophically determined sense, where Rancière and

Nancy perhaps share more common ground than they think, that is, where they are

131
Indeed, for Nancy, existence is radically shared, fundamentally in-commun, a phenomenon of being-
together in the common condition of being ex-posed, and of exposition to finitude. The en-commun of
community is, as he states, the “modalité propre (or impropre, as he would put it by a dialectical turn of the
screw), exclusive et originaire de l’être-là (…).”Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désoeuvrée, op. cit., p.
203.
132
Ibid., p. 222.
133
Let us recall that, for Frégier and other like-minded theorists of disciplinary capitalism (e.g., Poulot), le
loisir represents something of a double-edged sword. In theory and in practice, it is both necessary and
profoundly dangerous for discipline to the extent that loisir can so easily slip into oisiveté, that is, the
interval in which, as Marx put it, one is master of one’s time, is always potentially the interval in which a
refusal to work, a refusal of the disciplined everyday economy of capitalism can emerge. See, Frégier, op.
cit., vol. II, pp. 203-4.
 95

properly Rimbaldian, the cabaret is not just a place for community, for being-together, it

is a site of democracy as well.134

Rimbaud’s “Au Cabaret-vert…” constructs a Rancièrian scene of visibility and

audibility for subjectivities normally deprived of access to discourse, for “ces gens qui

n’ont pas à être comptés et qui ont la prétention d’être tout de même de la

collectivité”135 : for workers and waitresses, peasants and riff-raff – in a word, for the

demos. It is striking that we should see, as early as the verse poems of 1870, Rimbaud so

diligently applying himself at aggravating esthetic and ideological fault-lines within the

edifice of French poetry. And indeed, within the increasingly fraught historical and

political context in France in 1870-71, a similar enterprise of poetic indiscipline is not

only not absent, but it is clearly also far from politically or semantically neutral. In the

texts that inaugurate Rimbaud’s brief poetic career, there is a revolutionary an-archic

poetics at work. This poetic an-archism is what we earlier theorized as a poetics of

profanation – a mode of writing that reveals the submerged articulations linking the

esthetic to the political and insists on the right of any speaking being to occupy the sphere

of the poem, on the right of “tous et chacun de s’identifier (…) comme ayant place, rôle

et valeur –inestimable – dans l’être-ensemble.”136 Ultimately, the challenge that this text

leaves us with is that of taking the nothing(ness), le rien – the impropriety of being and

language, the empty seat of democratic power, the lack of a transcendental “beyond,” the

absence of titles or archè of the demos– of the quotidian seriously. Rimbaud leaves us

134
As Nancy writes, “Mais il devrait s’agir de porter la “ démocratie ” à son propre lieu d’énonciation et
d’exposition : à l’en-commun de ce “peuple ” dont elle porte le nom sans peut-être avoir encore trouvé la
voie, ni la voix, de son articulation.” Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., p. 233.
135
“Le Maître Ignorant: entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” in Et Tant pis pour les gens fatigués, op. cit., p.
4.
136
Jean-Luc Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie (Paris: Galilée, 2008), pp. 49-50.
 96

here with something we might call a lyrical democracy, or democracy in alexandrines. It

is appropriate enough; for in that année terrible, such would be the project of both

Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, that in-finite, incomplete and uncompleted democratic

uprising that, perhaps more than any other, revealed the void, the rien, the poetic an-

archy at the heart of the partage du sensible, that, however briefly, made the very

structures and forms of given everyday life – its sense of unavoidable reality – tremble.

VI. Nina, or, Don’t Forget to Laugh.

“Les reparties de Nina”

...................................................... Ô chair de fleur !

Riant au vent vif qui te baise
LUI — Ta poitrine sur ma poitrine, Comme un voleur,
Hein ? nous irions,
Ayant de l'air plein la narine, Au rose églantier qui t'embête
Aux frais rayons Aimablement :
Riant surtout, ô folle tête,
Du bon matin bleu, qui vous baigne À ton amant !...
Du vin de jour ?...
Quand tout le bois frissonnant saigne .............................................
Muet d'amour
— Ta poitrine sur ma poitrine,
De chaque branche, gouttes vertes, Mêlant nos voix,
Des bourgeons clairs, Lents, nous gagnerions la ravine,
On sent dans les choses ouvertes Puis les grands bois !...
Frémir des chairs :
Puis, comme une petite morte,
Tu plongerais dans la luzerne Le cœur pâmé,
Ton blanc peignoir, Tu me dirais que je te porte,
Rosant à l'air ce bleu qui cerne L'œil mi-fermé...
Ton grand œil noir,
Je te porterais, palpitante,
Amoureuse de la campagne, Dans le sentier :
Semant partout, L'oiseau filerait son andante :
Comme une mousse de champagne, Au Noisetier...
Ton rire fou :
Je te parlerais dans ta bouche ;
Riant à moi, brutal d'ivresse, J'irais, pressant
Qui te prendrais Ton corps, comme une enfant qu'on couche,
Comme cela, — la belle tresse, Ivre du sang
Oh ! — qui boirais
Qui coule, bleu, sous ta peau blanche
Ton goût de framboise et de fraise, Aux tons rosés :
 97

Et te parlant la langue franche... D'un ton gentil,

Tiens !... — que tu sais... Et pourlèche la face ronde
Du cher petit...
Nos grands bois sentiraient la sève,
Et le soleil ......................................................
Sablerait d'or fin leur grand rêve
Vert et vermeil. Que de choses verrons-nous, chère,
Dans ces taudis,
.......................................................... Quand la flamme illumine, claire,
Les carreaux gris !...
Le soir ?... Nous reprendrons la route
Blanche qui court — Puis, petite et toute nichée,
Flânant, comme un troupeau qui broute, Dans les lilas
Tout à l'entour Noirs et frais : la vitre cachée,
Qui rit là-bas...
Les bons vergers à l'herbe bleue,
Aux pommiers tors ! Tu viendras, tu viendras, je t'aime !
Comme on les sent toute une lieue Ce sera beau.
Leurs parfums forts ! Tu viendras, n'est-ce pas, et même...

Nous regagnerons le village ELLE — Et mon bureau ?137

Au ciel mi-noir ;
Et ça sentira le laitage
Dans l'air du soir ;

Ça sentira l'étable, pleine

De fumiers chauds,
Pleine d'un lent rythme d'haleine,
Et de grands dos

Blanchissant sous quelque lumière ;

Et, tout là-bas,
Une vache fientera, fière,
À chaque pas...

— Les lunettes de la grand-mère

Et son nez long
Dans son missel ; le pot de bière
Cerclé de plomb,

Moussant entre les larges pipes

Qui, crânement,
Fument : les effroyables lippes
Qui, tout fumant,

Happent le jambon aux fourchettes

Tant, tant et plus :
Le feu qui claire les couchettes
Et les bahuts.

Les fesses luisantes et grasses

D'un gros enfant
Qui fourre, à genoux, dans les tasses,
Son museau blanc
137
Arthur Rimbaud, “Les reparties de Nina,” in
Frôlé par un mufle qui gronde op. cit., pp. 71-4.
 98

But don’t forget that the function of comedy is only apparently without profundity. Through the very play of
the signifier...we find ourselves going beyond something that is simply depiction…to the revelation of what
lies below. Comedy makes us rediscover what…was present in the practice of nonsense.
- Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII

Looking back on some of the negative reactions to “Les reparties de Nina,”138 one

can’t help but wonder if they aren’t at base due to an unfortunate expectation on the part

of the reader that poetry always only be a serious affair. We forget too easily how funny

Rimbaud’s poetry can be, how ironically double-edged; we forget how the vaudevillian

and the comic can also be deadly serious, how it is only apparently, as the epigraph

above puts it, without profundity.139

As Dominique Combe argues,140 we need to think about the poetics of subversion

in this text perhaps first and foremost in a formal (and then, as I will show, semantic)

light, that is, as a parodic displacement, if not undermining, of the romantic idyll as a kind

of libidinal machine. While my analysis of this poem takes its cue from Combe’s

insightful reading of the poem, I seek here to theoretically and heuristically push

Combe’s hypothesis that this text is a profoundly derisive parody of the romantic idylle to

138
See for example, Jean-Pierre Bobillot, “Vaches, mouches, figures: Les reparties de Nina, Chanson de la
plus haute tour,” in Parade Sauvage 14 (May 1999), p. 27.
139
Indeed, perhaps with the exception of Bakhtin, we may have a tendency to forget the extent to which
vaudeville can be perceived as a deeply provocative approach to “high culture”. Etymologically, vaudeville,
shares a root with subversion, coming from vauder and virare, both signifying, “to turn”. Cf., Michèle
Acquien, Dictionnaire de poétique, op. cit., s.v., vaudeville. Such an oubli with respect to this poem in
particular is made all the more ironic by the fact that Rimbaud’s first real reader, Verlaine, noted a propos
of “Nina” that the poem was “d’une joliesse (…) sauvage,” but then goes on to add a series of graphic
winks in his text suggesting that “Nina” should indeed be read with a kind of gap between the first and
second (or third) degree of meaning and reading. Note for example his use of ironic use of italics and
ellipses when referring to Nina as a “petite morte,” or when evoking the milky odors of animal life that fill-
up the poem’s excipit: “Et après la promenade au bois…et la résurrection de la petite morte, l’entrée dans le
village où ça sentirait le laitage…” Paul Verlaine, Les Fêtes galantes, op. cit., p. 123. Jacques Lacan,
Seminar VII : The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York and London : W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 90.
140
Dominique Combe, “De l’idylle au vaudeville: Les Reparties de Nina,” in Lectures des Poésies et d’Une
Saison en enfer de Rimbaud, S. Murphy, ed. (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 47-57.
 99

an end that he himself does not designate. I will argue that the parody of the idyllic

discourse which Combe identifies accomplishes in esthetic and political terms a radically

subversive intervention into reifying representations of the feminine in poetic discourse

as they intersect with the disciplinary strategies and economy of capitalism.

The idyll is, generically speaking, a relatively short poem on the subject of love

taking place in a bucolic cadre. It represents a literary tradition going back to antiquity,

and was a poetic form and theme that was greatly appreciated by the Romantics of the

1830 generation (Hugo perhaps did more than any other poet in terms of rehabilitating

the idyll; see, for example, his Feuilles d’automne, or Les contemplations). On an

etymological level, the intersecting questions of form and the ideal are in fact inscribed

into the very name of the genre itself: idyll stems from the Greek, eidullion, which in turn

comes from eidos, or, the realm of transcendent, noumenological forms. The wager I’d

like to make about this poem, is that the level of formal transgression goes well beyond

itself, and attains something like this realm of “true ideas” (e.g., concerning class and

gender relations) that are given esthetic and ideological authority in both Parnassian

poetry and bourgeois society.

The metric count in “Les Reparties de Nina” also merits some attention, as it seems to

me to reproduce the kind of interplay between the structure of the poem and its content

that we saw in “Au Cabaret-vert”. First, we’ll remark that the poem manages to mark

itself as a heterogeneous form to the degree that it is heterometric: the quatrains are

written in a combination of octosyllabes and quadrisyllabes (intersecting lines of,

respectively, eight and four syllables). Now, in 1870, this doesn’t necessarily amount to

anything ostensibly revolutionary. The octosyllabe is one of those “simple” metrical

 100

forms (i.e., it is at the very syllabic threshold of a verse requiring a caesura, though not

requiring one itself), and thus we will not see the same species of formal and structural

transgressions that one can find in abundance in “Au Cabaret-vert” (or “Le Dormeur du

Val,” for that matter). In terms of its rhythm, it is generally divided into two hemistiches

of 4 syllables each.

That being stated, it is nevertheless crucial to point out that the octosyllabe occupies

something of a cultural zone of liminality. By that, I mean simply that the octosyllabe is a

polyvalent meter, employed just as frequently, and indeed more so, in the domain of

popular and indeed political songs as in the vein of the lyrical (perhaps the most well-

known popular song in the French language, La Marseillaise, is written in octosyllabic

meter). Its use is highly attested in Hugo’s poetry, if we may take him, as many of his

contemporaries did, as a kind of synecdoche of the nineteenth-century lyric. Furthermore,

when, in verse poetry, we come across texts with “chant” or “chanson” in the title, we

can be fairly certain that we are dealing with a poem in octosyllabes. It has therefore a

kind of hybrid identity which bridges the gap between the domain of high art and popular

culture; indeed, in its way, it functions as a kind of figure of the dissemination of

language that problematizes the very gesture of drawing of divides between the noble and

the ignoble, the élévé and the bas, between the esthetic and the political, between the

sacred and the profane. We ought to keep in mind for our reading of “Nina” the fact that,

in Rimbaud’s infratextual production from 1871-72, one notices that the octosyllabe is

the poet’s preferred vehicle for poetic parody; its use is fairly recurrent (up until 1872),

especially in the satirico-political poems that directly engage with the Paris Commune.141

141
E.g., “Chant de guerre parisien,” “Les mains de Jeanne-Marie,” and, notably, the post-semaine-
sanglante ”Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos des fleurs”. This latter poem is something of a masterpiece of
 101

Rather than proceed with a linear reading of the text, I propose to take things

backwards, so to speak. Ultimately, I believe that such an approach not only does the

most justice to the poem, in a sense that is at once structurally anachronistic and meta-

discursively subversive (for in final analysis, the “joke” may be on traditional esthetics

and ways of reading a poem), the poet himself invites us to do so. For, recalling the

symbolic clues that the poet leaves throughout the text as a way of anticipating the

traumatic encounter with the subject’s annihilation in the “Le Dormeur du Val,” the

closer we look at “Nina,” the more clues we find to support, après coup as it were, the

hypothesis of a sardonic rampage through the genre of the idyll. The more we (re)read the

poem, the more we might have expected that a surprise might be in store for us.

Take, for example, that ultimate isotopia of romantico-parnassian poetry,

“Nature”. Here, “Nature” self-de(con)structs under the pressure of a proliferation of

signifiers that, upon reflection, seem to formally and semantically undermine the idyllic

promenade at the very moment that it is set up. With “Nina,” Rimbaud transforms the

eglogia of the idyll into a kind of alogia, or precisely the type of stricto sensu poverty of

speech, of infantia, that the poem’s protagonist/object of desire, Nina, embodies. We

might take as an example of this kind of poetic destabilization the dissolution of the

binary divide between the inside and the outside, or Nature and the City. Indeed, it is

significant that this collapsing of exterior and interior becomes particularly visible in the

climactic moment of the imagined idyll – an imagined sexual union that not only comes

quite early in the text, rather than at the end, as the conventions of the genre would have

parody that constitutes a truly merciless attack on Parnassian esthetics and advances into the domain of
what we might call an “anti-capitalist” poetics that anticipates the most radical and provocative gestures of
the early twentieth-century avant-garde (I have in mind here particularly Duchamp’s “ready-mades”).
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it, but that is furthermore tinged with a slightly sadistic erotic charge – thus figuring on a

structural level something like the dream of bucolic adventure and companionship that

forms the poem’s immediately apparent content. In lines 13-16, the feminine figure is

stereotypically portrayed in a state of partial disrobement, with her “peignoir” plunged

into an alfalfa bush. This single quatrain could function as a self-reflexive allegory of the

difficulties of placing oneself at the “hermeneutic horizon” of the past, and especially of

reading Rimbaud’s early poetic production in which a parodic, critical element is often

closely bound up with an emergent, original poetic voice and vision.

In one sense, we might take the projects of departure and community, of love

mixed with a sense of freedom, at face value, as they indeed form something like the

thematic bedrock of many of these early texts. And yet, simultaneously, it is difficult not

to hear something like the poet’s laughter erupting from the text the moment we naively

let ourselves be drawn into such a monovalent textual optimism. At the very moment of

seduction, Rimbaud suggests that we are letting ourselves be lead astray (etymologically,

seduced) by a risible fantasy, which he then proceeds to pervert. Not to put too fine a

point on the question, but Nina, for example, is wearing…a bathrobe – hardly suitable

attire for a voyage on foot through the countryside.142 Furthermore, how are we to read

the syntactically bizarre distic, “rosant à l’air ce bleu qui cerne / ton grand oeil noir”

which accompanies this scene of voyeuristic disrobing? Is the “grand oeil noir” to be

taken as a synecdoche – a fairly familiar and indeed clichéd romantic trope – designating

142
According to the 1872 Littré, a peignoir is either a “manteau de toile, de calicot ou de flanelle qu’on
met sur ses épaules quand on se peigne. On le dit aussi d’un manteau semblable qu’on met quand on sort du
bain ; ” or a “vêtement de femme, en forme de robe (…), que les dames portent lorsqu’elles sont en
déshabillé”. It’s thus a form of clothing which immediately confers an erotic, voyeuristic dimension to the
scene, but also, and above all, a garment typically found in the intimacy of the bedroom or the bathroom.
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the feminine subject, Nina? This very ambiguity is in fact typical of the way Rimbaud

deploys an entire array of romantic clichés (indeed, this is the case for the entire first

section of the poem) to parodic, if not slightly obscene ends.

In order to understand the subversive strategy at work here, we need to think this

image in conjunction (as the syntagm, rosant ce bleu qui cerne / ton grand oeil noir, of

course requires of us) with the action that precedes it. Roser, in French, literally means

“to make something pink,” yet it is not an easy task to decipher what precisely is the

object and what is the agent of the visual transformation in the “blue” to “pink”

surrounding Nina’s “grand oeil noir”. We might hear in “rosant” a homophonic echo with

Rosée, or, “dew,” a trope of romantic discourse than one might reasonably expect to find

in a poem exploring the themes of an idyllic walk through a forest that is “frissonnant/

muet d’amour”. In fact, if we take into account the polyptotic143 profusion of “laughter”

in the first few stanzas of this text, it’s possible to read “rosée” as a risible cliché of

Romantic poetry. But before we explore this possibility we must ask: how are we to

understand this participial verb, “rosant” (to make [something] pink, or to create

dew[drops] )?

I would argue that we would do better to focus less on the colors in question, and

more on the question of discursive and semantic fields of popular and libertine discourse

of the era. Starting with the grand era of libertine and erotic literature in the eighteenth

century (one invariably is reminded of the frequency of references, especially in scenes

143
A polyptoton is a figure of speech that plays on the theme of difference and identity in a verb, often by
including several conguations of a single verb or the juxtaposition of a verb and a noun-form of the verb, or
a participle functioning as an adjective. A common example can be found in Racine’s Bérénice: “Rome
vous craindra plus que vous ne craignez Rome.”
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depicting sodomy, to “rosée” in Sade) “rosée” is a traditional metaphor for signifying

“semen”.144 Read thusly, the “grand oeil noir” undergoes a corporeal displacement that

would have no doubt been more than a little shocking for your average reader (or poet,

for that matter) in 1870. “Oeil” may not function so much as a synecdoche representing

Nina, but may rather be a euphemistically displaced metonym for designating the anus.

Perhaps, then, already the poet is pulling our leg with one hand while pointing something

out with the other – namely, our epistemological incapacity to see the abject object of the

anus or the sexual act of sodomy because they are contained and foreclosed by culturally

constructed normative narratives and signs (sememes) of sexuality (as Kristeva reminds

us, the anus is a figure of the abject precisely because we neither represent it to ourselves

notionally or specularly). Indeed, the end logic of this is, of course, that heteronormative

gender identities are mapped as a kind of idyllic narrative of the self. Such a specular

displacement is actually suggested by the use of the expression “mon oeil” in popular

discourse of the era. According, once more, to Delvau this expression not only serves to

express an ironically skeptical disbelief,145 but is itself a kind of litote, a euphemistic

transposition referring not to the eye but to the more vulgar “podex,” or ass.146 (The

144
Alfred Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne par un professeur de langue verte (Neuchâtel :
Imprimerie de la société des bibliophile cosmopolites, 1874), s.v., rosée.
145
This skepticism also has meta-poetic consequences for the situation of the idyll, whose romantic
oeillades Rimbaud refutes with a devastating mon oeil.
146
“ Oeil: s.m., le podex – dans l’argot des fauboriens facétieux.” Alfred Delvau, Dictionnaire de la langue
verte, op. cit., s.v., œil. The use of latin where popular discourse refers to parts of the body perceived as
vulgar is recurrent with Delvau. It is also highly significant that this be not only an instance of popular
slang, but of working-class, fauborien argot, for this continues the tactic by which Rimbaud contaminates
the natural with the urban. Steve Murphy, for example, has suggestively argued that the andante, i.e., the
song that the bird sings in line 43 and which has eluded many attempts to situate it in a coherent discourse,
may in fact be a song entitled Au noisetier, a reference to a popular (and indeed perhaps Parisian) bawdy
song from the era known as the Noisette. See, Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres Complètes, t. 1: poésies, Steve
Murphy, ed. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), pp. 250-1. Jean-Pierre Bobillot has noted that this play of
subversion never completely defuses itself in this text: in line 65, he notes that at the precise moment when
the “idyllic couple” traverses an imaginary space of animality, it’s possible to pick out a vaguely grivois
“verge” in the scene of the “bon vergers à l’herbe bleue”. See Jean-Pierre Bobillot, art. cit., pp 28-9.
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opening pun from the first line of the Sonnet du trou du cul, a text written in collaboration

with Paul Verlaine in the Fall of 1871, would no doubt reinforce such a reading: “Obscur

et foncé comme un oeillet violet,” where the scansion in the second hemistiche allows

one to hear in the pronunciation of “oeillet,” or poppy, the homonymic “oeil est”.)147 The

poet here seems to be playing with a discourse that he purposely saturates with rather

unremarkable series of romantic clichés in order to deterritorialize them, in order to

transform, or deform, the formal and idealized romance of the idyll into a scene of base

eroticism and ironic meta-poetic commentary, of material paraphilia and critique.

Let us go back to the end, though. One of the difficulties that one encounters upon

a first reading of the poem is its uncanny capacity to elude narrative synthesis. We are

left, at the end, holding a kind of hermeneutic bag, wondering: “what just happened?”

The poem could, somewhat arbitrarily, be divided into three sections, or stages (indeed,

there’s a didascalic element that needs to be taken into account in the poem, as though

these were “lines” being rehearsed or, in French, répéter, repeated or parroted,

performed): 1) L’invitation au voyage where Lui attempts to seduce Elle148 by the sheer

force and verve of the poetic verb; 2) a stop in a country inn or cabaret in which an

erotically tinged fantasy (to which we shall return) of “slumming it” is ostensibly set-up

(lines 65-92); 3), the last three quatrains in which Lui avows his love for Elle.

At this precise moment, however, we notice something of a figure of the sublime

– a stammering in language as the poet’s discourse stumbles, fails, and tumbles in turn

into silence, followed by the sole occurrence of discourse attributed to Elle in the entire

147
Ibid., p. 601. Of course, the œillet is also quite literally a “small eye”. We will return to this flower qua
socio-semitotically constructed para-signifier of homosexual desire in our chapter on the Album zutique.
148
A possible allusion to that Romantic ode of love’s miseries par excellence, George Sand’s Elle et Lui?
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text if we don’t count for the moment the lexical indications of laughter and the two

series of ellipses attributed to Nina. Perhaps discourse is too strong a term. Chute,149 or

punch-line, might be a more appropriate way of thinking about what happens at the end

of this text.

One of the best definitions of humor comes to us, via Bergson, from Kant.

Though it’s decidedly a little tedious to imagine the philosopher hard at work in his study

mapping out a precise phenomenology of the funny, what better way to sum up precisely

what it is that provokes laughter in a text or a situation than to see in it the total

interruption of one’s expectations (“Kant disait déjà [in the Critique du jugement

esthétique]: ‘le rire vient d’une attente qui se résout subitement en rien’).150 Indeed, there

is perhaps no more apposite description of the laughter that Rimbaud evokes at the end of

this text than what Bergson calls, glossing on Kant, “l’indice d’un effort qui rencontre

tout à coup le vide;” or the disproportionality of a “grand effet sortant d’une petite

cause.”151

It is precisely this species of rupture – of tone, register, expectation, of cause and

effect – that occurs in the laconic line, Et mon bureau? (Let us not delude ourselves: even

if we might accuse the poet of indulging the masculine voice with 104 verses of poetic

149
Jean-Pierre Chambon was the first to use this term in an article some 30 years ago. However, our own
conclusions obviously will break off somewhat fundamentally from the rest of Chambon’s argument.
Chambon affirms that the only possible interpretation of “et mon bureau” is to see in bureau another man,
for “[t]oute autre interprétation ferait en effet contre-sens et [priverait de] son sel (…) la repartie de Nina
(donc au poème tout entier). ” Such categorical stabilizations of an otherwise important polysemiotic play
around the final semem seem to my mind to rely far more than they ought to on a kind of “performative
argumentation,” that does no justice to either the poem or Chambon’s own analysis. See Jean-Pierre
Chambon, “Quelques problèmes de vocabulaire,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes: Arthur Rimbaud 4
(1980), p. 101.
150
Henri Bergson, Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique (Paris :Editions Alcan, 1924), p. 41.
151
Ibid.
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effusion, the impact of this single line devastatingly undermines what is most

objectifying in the masculine fantasy, and compels us to reread the poem in a new,

parodic light, from the title to the ending, making it consequently the most important,

determinant line of verse in the entire text)

There is probably no more economical pied de nez to the reigning poetic

conceptions of the beautiful in French poetry. One can only imagine the reaction of a de

Lisle (or a Gautier, or a de Banville, etc.) faced with a closing rhyme pair that

phonetically and notionally unites the beautiful and the tediously mundane

(beau/bureau). In order to grasp Nina’s rejoinder in the full force of comic subversion,

we have to hear in it not so much a mixture of socio-lexical registers, but rather a kind of

antagonism between two irreconcilable idioms. First we encounter the effusive discourse

that, by the poem’s excipit, reveals itself to be less idiomatically misunderstood than it is

an incomprehensibly idiotic masculine poetic voice chock full of what retrospectively

appear to be hackneyed clichés, real effects of dumb repetition. Take, for example, the

poem’s “bois frissonants” (line 7) , its “rose églantier” (line 29),152 or its “oiseaux filant

andante” (line 43); or, for that matter, the recurrent trope of apopsiopesis (i.e., those little

moments of aphasia, such as in “parlant la langue franche…tiens que tu sais”)153 and its

emphasis on the emotive pole of the linguistic axis. When we look back at the poem, it is

152
A possible intertextual target of parody might be found in the third section of “Paysages” (known as “La
Demoiselle”) from Théophile Gautier’s Poésies diverses. This poem shares both semantic and formal
aspects of Rimbaud’s “Nina” (it too is a heterometric idylle), and its opening image is that of “la bruyère
arrosée/ de rosée/ sur le buisson d’églantier”. Notice that within Rimbaud’s “rose églantier qui t’embête,”
we can clearly detect a paranomastic play taking place around the verb “embêter,” the agent of which is a
flower – i.e., a literal sexual organ – whose very name contains a kind of calembour: [e] [g:lã] [t e] Æ et
gland, t’y es. You’ll get there when you (also) hear the “gland”. See Théophile Gautier, “La Demoiselle,”
in Poésies complètes (Paris: Charpentier, 1863), p.72.
153
Perhaps this mobilization of a figure of rupture within discourse, that interrupts its coherence is itself a
kind of malicious wink, allegorizing something like the poet’s attitude towards poetic tradition.
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positively overflowing with elementary particles of poetic discourse that serve as co-

ordinates allowing us to identify, make sense of, and, most importantly, take seriously

(upon a first reading, anyway) the lyrical discourse.

By the end of the poem, we realize that this lyrical idiom was in latent conflict

with something else all along – with an idiom that it is tempting to call by opposition a

“realist,” or materialist, discourse –154 a disenchanted and violently demystifying

language of the everyday. What happens is a kind of discombobulation of poetry through

the irruption of the vulgar – a language that is ridiculous155 to the precise extent that it

renders poetic language ridiculous, and to the extent that it ceaselessly defers further and

later on the moment of the revelation of the poem’s “meaning”.

Indeed, the sense in which we are to understand “Et mon bureau” is, like the

poem, like language itself, opaque. It seems self-apparent, but upon further inspection at

least two possibilities open up for us along two different axes of language. We clearly

have a conjunction (“Et…”) with an oppositional, or disjunctive, value, appearing, then,

as a kind of symbolically castrating intervention of the reality principle which puts an

abrupt stop to the attempted lyrical seduction. But what about mon bureau ? What is the

final obstacle that Nina throws up to frustrate the masculine poet’s attempt to fixate on

and fix her in lyrical discourse? One possibility is language itself. Any attempt at fixing a

monovalent meaning to this syntagma faces the prospect of its own decomposition, the

very real possibility of the encounter with “non”-sense. Indeed, “Et mon bureau” opens

154
For Jean-Pierre Bobillot, indeed, the “langue franche” of the poem may be less a libertine discourse to
which the poet qua lover has already initiated Nina (Cf., J.P. Chambon, art. cit.) than the “évocation
drument réaliste et, singulièrement olfactive de la campagne…”. Jean-Pierre Bobillot, art. cit., p. 28.
155
There is something like a burlesque performance, or performative, taking place here. To really
appreciate the comic value of Nina’s repartie, it might help to imagine the line in the mouth of an Arletty.
 109

up, or emblematizes rather, a serious discrepancy between a grammatical and a rhetorical

reading of the signifier – a gap that leads to two divergent hermeneutic possibilities. For

on one combinatory axis, her “bureau” could function as a metonym, along the logic of

pars pro toto. It could be that the bureau is a substitute for the identity of a husband, a

boyfriend, etc. – in sum, the employé de bureau that Nina posits as the reason for the

idyll’s impossible realization (in which case, the real force of Nina’s comical

interrogation resides in the fact that the identity of the agent is reified, has been so

contaminated as to have been replaced by economic activity as such). Such a reading is

all the less philologically improbable to the extent that in a poem dating from

approximately the same period (“À la musique”) we find just such a (satirical)

metaphorics deployed in order to mock the provincial bourgeoisie: “les gros bureaux

bouffis trainent leurs grosses dames”.156 On the other hand, we can, and perhaps would

do just as well to see in “mon bureau” a kind of reference, in the form of an apocope, to a

place. Beyond dramatizing a confrontation between competing masculine claims on/for

the feminine body and/or desire,157 why not (pace Chambon) take the bureau simply as

the base reality and excessively un-romantic place of work, the ultimate metonym of

capitalism?

We ought then to understand Nina’s rejoinder as pointing towards the alienation

of one’s (free) time, the transformation of one’s activities into the hard necessity of labor

156
“À la musique,” in Arthur Rimbaud, O.C., op. cit., p. 94. Chambon notes (J.P. Chambon, art. cit.,
pp.100-1) that “les éditeurs [i.e., S. Bernard, A. Adam, etc.) prennent soin de noter que dans ‘A la musique’
(…) Rimbaud emploie le mot bureau dans le sens de ‘bureaucrate’.”
157
In the interest of time, I won’t take this analysis too far afield. However, it bears stating that it could be
very fruitful to pursue a psychoanalytic reading of this text as an allegory of desire qua phantasmagorical
projection. Indeed, for Lacan, l’objet a, the thing that sets off desire in a subject is frequently, in and of
itself, inconceivably insignificant, if not stupid. Its function, of course, is to act as a screen for projection
and as a site of libidinal investment – such is no doubt the role of “La Femme” for the masculine voice and
gaze in Romantic poetry.
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value that must be sold on the market. But here, again, it’s not just economic alienation

that we’re dealing with – or, rather, we’re dealing with a mode of alienation that aims at

being truly totalizing, touching language itself as that which makes social, libidinal,

imaginary, etc., rapports possible. Not only is the “dialogue” between Lui and Elle the

occasion of a spectacularly comical breakdown of communication, but perhaps the real

coup de génie lies in the poet’s ironic suggestion that, of the two of them, Elle is no doubt

less mystified about her “historical situation” than is the masculine lyrical voice – and in

extenso, perhaps this voice, advancing as it does a fundamental misrecognition, a

misrepresentation of gender relations and modes of production, is one voice, or

apparatus, of ideology. In final analysis, the wild element that gums up the poetic works

is not just the bureau (whether we see in it a referential site or a castrating metonym).

Rather, if we recall the “art-for-art’s-sake” credo of Parnassus that proclaimed the radical

social inutility of poetry, perhaps the real target of Nina’s question is the sentimental

mystification of a poetic voice that aims at masking the truth of its situation – i.e., the fact

that despite the Parnassian attempt to turn away from the present, to withdraw the esthetic

from the domain of history or the political, poetry nevertheless exists in relation to the

world, if only as a kind of work on (or unworking, désoeuvrement, or idleness in)

language; the fact that poetry too is a form of reproducing, or displacing, the given

material and the imaginary perceptions of everyday life.

Nina’s fin mot, in the unanticipated laughter that it provokes, is a kind of uncanny

experience of one’s self as a reader, to boot. Et mon bureau? unexpectedly erupts in the

poem, forcing us to re-evaluate prior elements in the poem to which we attributed no

particular meaning, or took as markers of non-sense as such, of the dislocation or the

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failure of communication – elements such as the poems ellipses.158 Is there not, on second

reading, something rather remarkable in Nina’s negative capacity, due to her radical and

persistent infancy, to produce a thoroughly radical critique of the lyrical model and the

sorts of relations that it renders possible between subjects? Indeed, the ellipses, the

enigmatic absence of a response, represent what Lacan would call “the core enigma of

the Other’s desire” that is, ultimately, unknowable – whence the retrospectively

somewhat hysterical effusion of the masculine poetic voice. The ellipses, which are

perhaps the “reparties” of the title and which only become legible après coup as an effect

of the poem’s closing, grotesque irony, are the staging of the failure of the lyrical model.

They are, in other words, the trace of its own textualized lack (etymologically, elleipsis)

of ability to read (leipein gives us nec-legere in Latin) or give voice to the feminine

Other, its inevitable tendency to make of the feminine an idol, a fetish – a reified thing, a

pure cipher of exchange-value within the masculine libidinal economy of the idyll. At

base, we might even say that Rimbaud subtly underscores and undermines what could be

the necrophilia of Parnassus, (itself directly inherited from Romanticism’s neo-medieval

vision of the unattainable feminine object of desire) that is, a drive to symbolically kill

off its women in order to better sing their praise, in order to better love them once their

real presence is effaced and, simultaneously, phantasmagorically preserved in the tissue

(or text) of the symbolic.159 It is thus that we might best understand some of the more

158
See Jean-François Laurent, “Reparties en pointillés: d’un manuscrit à l’autre, ou les implications d’un
pluriel,” Parade Sauvage 3 (1986), p. 30.
159
The proto-typical example of this is, notwithstanding the extract from Cros’ “La Dame en pierre” cited
above, Lamartine’s “Le Lac”. To be fair, this “necrophilic” tendency to obliterate the feminine is hardly the
prerogative of the Romantics, who no doubt actualize here a poetic tradition that goes back to the courtly
love tradition of medieval lyric poetry. Nevertheless, one might argue that this is something like a
structuring phenomenon of masculine discourse in (but not limited to) the nineteenth century. The example
of Fleur-de-Marie, from Eugène Sue’s best-selling Les Mystères de Paris is a decidedly revealing one in
this respect. See Peter Brooks’ “The Mark of the Beast,” in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in
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bizarre syntactical constructions that one comes across in this text, such as the curious “je

parlerai dans ta bouche” (line 45). At first glance, it’s an awfully curious, if not awkward

construction (the visual equivalent in the text is no doubt the twice repeated – lines 1 and

33 – “ta poitrine sur ma poitrine,” a kubuki, or perhaps erotic, posture that is so difficult

to imagine as appropriate for a traipse through the countryside that one suspects that it is

deliberately aiming at making the poem a joke from its very opening line). In light of the

rest of the text, read backwards, so to speak, it becomes more plausible that it is

purposefully staging a scene of prosopopia in order to denounce it. “Nina” stages a

ventriloquist’s act in order to denounce the symbolically violent gesture by which the

poet must kill or silence the feminine voice so as to speak it under the guise of an

unattainable object of desire (we’ll recall that the strictly rhetorical definition of

prosopopia is to make the dead or the absent, the radically, structurally infans speak). Is it

any wonder that Rimbaud drives this perversity home in the same stanza by having the

masculine poet refer to Nina as a petite morte – an idiomatic expression whose

polyvalence is well-known in libertine discourse.

But perhaps the most important aspect of this mise en scène of the failure of the

lyrical is simply the tautological fact that it takes place within a poem that is formally

lyrical itself. Nina’s “repartie” indeed subverts lyrical poetry from within, setting up two

antithetical models of reading and writing poetry side by side and in tension. It is, in other

words, a parody: it is a song (lyre) that is à côté, perverse or perverted, that is improper.

The parody is opposed to the original in its very repetition of it, in its gesture of making

Narrative (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 143-71. See also, Barbara
Johnson, “The Lady in the Lake,” in A New History of French Literature, Denis Hollier, ed. (Cambridge
and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 627-632.
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the original different from itself, un-original. “Les Reparties de Nina” is therefore a

metapoetic parody that carefully places within its text clues pointing towards its status as

commentary, pointing to an awareness that it is manifesting a critically subversive

attitude towards sexual difference, that it is mocking the style, the imaginary, and the

form (and here we come back round to the eidos in the idyllic, its purported metaphysical

truth) of a (certain sentimental mystification in?) lyric poetry that Rimbaud has judged as

passé if not perverse. Nina’s final reply provokes our laughter, a Bakhtinian laughter that

retrospectively turns the whole text into a kind of antiphrastic, derisively parodic

commentary that we must re-read in an ironic mode if we are to understand it at all. If we

are to understand that it’s “ok” to laugh at poetry (which is perhaps ultimately no failure

at all).

Yet, it bears pointing out that we didn’t have to wait until the end of the text in

order to catch-on to its double game of parody and critique. To conclude, I’d like to

briefly single out two elements that most directly point to this text’s ideological and

stylistic complicity with “Au Cabaret-vert”.

The first has to do with the audacious use of language in the poem, an example of

which can be found in the recurrence of the (extremely familiar) indefinite pronoun, ça.

Ça comes back again and again, particularly referring to animal and excretory odors: ça

sentira l’étable, le foin, le fumier, etc. And what of the very first line of the text? We’ve

already suggested something of the physical improbability of walking with ta poitrine sur

ma poitrine (though there are other things one could do). Indeed, if we look at the very

next line of verse we can find what has become on second reading a hilarious
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enjambment (a rejet) that is surgical in its conjunction of structural and semantic effects:

hein?

Indeed, the poem’s second line should have tipped us off that something funny

was afoot. For what is hein, after all? On a sociolexical level, it’s of course an index of

spoken (somewhat vulgar) discourse that phonetically is in many ways just as shocking

as Nina’s final, boorish reply. In terms of structural linguistics, however, “hein” is what

Jakobson first defined as a phatic – i.e., a communicational device whose only function is

to ensure that the poles between the enunciator and the interlocutor are open, that

linguistic communication is functioning properly. In other words, the hein, is a way of

signifying from the beginning that what is in question is the code and its breakdown, its

(comical) malfunctioning. Ultimately, we could say the same communication breakdown

being staged between lui and elle applies to our own relation, as readers, to the text.

“Hein” is the poem’s way of poking at us, of asking us whether or not we’re hearing the

poem, whether we’ve grasped that the code is in play, or whether we’ll have to wait to

the end to realize that a beaming gap has open up between the dire and the comment-dire,

between form and meaning.

We ought to add a parenthetical last word on laughter. For Nina isn’t entirely

silent, is she?160 Like the waitress from “Au Cabaret-vert,” she is also portrayed as

laughing, an important lack of linguistic signifiers that is in fact profoundly meaningful –

for laughter is not just a kind of affective semiosis, it also, here, contributes both a

160
As Laurent suggests the poet’s “ Le soir ?....nous reprendrons la route,” in the opening line after the first
(or is it the second?) series of ellipses suggests a situation of interlocution, a response to a question posed
but displaced by the graphic suspension or repression of feminine discourse figured by the ellipses. Cf.
Jean-François Laurent, art. cit.
 115

critique of the romantic discourse and a form of agency to the feminine. It is thus an

instance of what Julia Kristeva has termed the “semiotic,” or, an instance of elementary

deformation within a dominant discourse that poses a serious challenge to its capacity to

operate properly. Nina’s laughter is in this sense semiotically ambivalent; it is no doubt

less a sign of coquettishness than of her capacity to see as ridiculous the effusive,

improbable sentimentality of the proposed erotic adventure (i.e., “and you expect me to

be able to leave my work behind?,” etc.). It suffices to take a quick look at the passages

where Nina’s imagined laughter breaks-out in order to arrive at the conclusion that her

laughter is a mocking one, one of refusal (lines 21, 31 especially). In fact, throughout this

first section we notice a kind of polyptoton taking place around the lexemes which evoke

laughter: “nous irions” (2); “rire fou” and “riant” (21); “riant” again (27); “Riant surtout

(…) à ton amant” (31 – notice how grammatically the rapports of agency are inverted

here, how the poet qua lover is a strict object of Nina’s laughter).161 It’s quite precisely as

though poetic language were seized by a fit of uncontrollable giggles – by a laughter (a

crucial figure, then, of the feminine voice which, as Laurent has perspicuously suggested,

is anything but silent)162 provoked by the risibility of the idyll itself.

Ambiguous as it is, this laughter nevertheless subsides with the transition point of

the poem, where the space transitions to that of the countryside and into a village inn.

And it is especially here that Rimbaud cultivates a formal ambiguity in which the lyrical

and the profane coincide, or where the boundary separating the one from the other is

irremediably blurred (reminding us ultimately of the heterogeneity of the octosyllabe as

161
Here, again, I depart slightly from Chambon’s analysis, in which the split between “moi” and “ton
amant” means that there can only be two male subjects, two male desires, in play in the text. Cf. Chambon,
art. cit., p. 101.
162
Jean-François Laurent, art. cit.
 116

both a vehicle for the lyrical and the popular). There’s something in these passages that

we must call a poetics of materiality, that is, a poetic practice and esthetics applying

pressure to normatively, or naively lyrical, accounts of the self, the other, the body and

the world. Nowhere is this perhaps more apparent than in the passage where the décor

shifts from the countryside to a village (starting in line 65), from the private to the in-

common – a return to the collective space of the city (or of the Commune) that may

perhaps just as well be taken as a kind of poetico-political allegory of the poetry’s re-

entry back into the Republic from which the archè-esthetics (to gloss on Rancière’s

reading of Plato’s archè-politics) of Parnassus had attempted to banish it.163 This same

esthetic method is, furthermore, at the antipodes of Hugolian-inspired miserabilist visions

of the petit peuple, a point to which we shall return.

In this text we catch a whiff of a number of odors. The perfume of apple-trees and

the musk of a dairy-farm mingling with the scent of a humid dung-heap, with the whole

evoked to the rhythm of cows defecating with each lumbering step they take in their

pastures. Now, despite being an aggressively and structurally transgressive image on the

level of what we might call the poem’s cultural sense of the imaginary real (i.e., a

mélange of consumption and excretion, of milk and manure, of the oral and the anal),164

we ought to keep in mind the extent to which, prior to Rimbaud, this is something of a

163
Cf., Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, op. cit., p. 66.
164
For Bobillot the entire preceding idyll is to be taken in the sense of a regression from the genital to the
anal stage – as a step back, in normative terms, to a “less mature” sexual formation. What he is thus forced
to marginalize, however, is the suggestion we attempted to highlight in the above passage on Nina’s “grand
oeil noir”: i.e., that the proposed heteronormative idyll, ideologically and poetically immature as it may be,
might also provide the esthetic space for a transformation within the normative that allows other desires to
be spoken, put into circulation, etc. – desires that strategically, if provisionally, slip out of the logic of the
norm, and thus trouble the binary divide separating “progressive” [i.e., genital, heteronormal, oedipal, etc.]
forms and expressions of sexual identity and desires from “regressive” ones [i.e., anal, homoerotic,
homosexual, etc.]. See Jean-Pierre Bobillot, art. cit., p., 29.
 117

nineteenth-century poetic singularity, or, faux-pas. One simply does not, no matter what

school or movement one belongs to, bring up cow-feces in verse poetry (perhaps the

ultimate shock is in the paradoxically beautiful, labio-dental and liquid alliteration of the

phonemes that constitute the image itself: “une vache fientera fière”).

A cow, on the other hand, would pose no problem. After all, it’s a sufficiently

bucolic animal to provide the occasion for a properly grounded metaphor about Nature.

However, as John Huston rightly pointed out for the wrong reasons,165 Rimbaud is not

tempted here to give in to metaphysico-allegorical readings of the pastoral world. The

dairy-farm isn’t a metaphor for fecundity any more than the cows are allegories of the

passively, dumbly harmonious pastoral world (or of peasants, for that matter). Not only is

animal life not metaphorized, it is as though the real dream of the poem is for the

imagined couple to traverse animal space, to integrate it (and here, line 57, we are in the

domain of the utopia as such – the creation of a community outside of time). In final

analysis, there’s perhaps less a binary divide between Nature and Culture, less an anxiety

over the legibility of signs in/of the natural world, than a kind of confusion of the two.

Perhaps this is the sense of the semiotic transgression consisting in juxtaposing milk and

feces – themselves metaphors of transformation, if not of poetry; metaphors, in other

words, of an undecidable ontological point that is both cultural and natural, or, strictly

speaking, human.

Conclusion

To read this poem as merely the disqualification of one kind of hypostasizing

ideal (i.e., that of the utopian idyll which fails to re-imagine social relations on any
165
John Huston, op. cit., p. 22.
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meaningful plane) is to only go halfway. As usual with Rimbaud, we can read this “end

of the idyll” as simultaneously signaling the debut, or at the very least, the necessity of

another project, one to which the poet later refers at the time of the Commune as the

emancipation of woman and the proletariat, and, later, in Une saison en enfer as the

reinvention of love itself.166 The poetic buffoonery that Rimbaud stages here is at base a

polemical problematization of patriarchal exploitation of women, but one which crucially

refuses to separate this problem off from the larger context of class relations, and indeed,

if the fin mot of the poem is any indication, sees gender-based oppression as knotted

inextricably to, and perhaps over-determined in final analysis by, symbolic and economic

alienation.

Perhaps, then, the ridicule to which the romantic idyll is here subjected forms the

point of departure for a radically egalitarian, utopian remapping (or reinvention?) of not

only gender relations, but, as the necessary prior step, of class relations too – this would,

after all, be only too coherent in the pre-Commune cultural context of 1870. Nina’s

“realism” would then be a modernism in the sense that Jameson deploys this ostensible

paradox or binary antagonism, a realism that is not opposed to, but rather needs to be

accounted for within the conceptual co-ordinates and grammar of modernism as a

166
“Quand sera brisé l’infini servage de la femme, quand elle vivra pour elle et par elle, l’homme –
jusqu’ici abominable - , lui ayant donné son renvoi, elle sera poète, elle aussi !”; from Vierge folle : “Il dit :
‘Je n’aime pas les femmes. L’amour est à réinventer, on le sait. Elles ne peuvent plus que vouloir une
position assurée. La position gagnée, cœur et beauté sont mis de côté : il ne reste que froid dédain, l’aliment
du mariage, aujourd’hui.” in A. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, A. Guyaux, ed., op. cit., pp. 347 and 260.
Here, we’ll note that Rimbaud is deploying a discourse of feminine emancipation that formed part of the
doxological foundation of nineteenth-century working-class critiques of capitalist society, from the Saint-
Simonian movement through the Commune (especially in the figures of Communards such as Eugène
Varlin, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Louise Michel, etc.). Indeed, the passage from the Lettre du voyant could
almost be read as a pastiche of a work by Claire Demar (the feminist to whom Walter Benjamin devotes
some time in his analysis the “femme héroïque” in Baudelaire), entitled “Ma loi d’avenir”. In this work,
Demar argues: “ (…) plus de maternité (…) – la femme délivrée, affranchie du joug, de la tutelle (…) de
l’homme (…), [elle] ne tiendra son existence, sa position sociale que de sa capacité et de ses œuvres (…).”
in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 133.
 119

subversive esthetic and political moment. “Nina’s” realism occurs, ultimately, as a

break(down) of signs in which “the emergence of new perceptions” may occur.167

I claim, then, that we are witnessing in this text the elaboration of a poetic vision

and project that necessarily includes within its symbolic space of expression a subject

that Jacques Rancière appeals to as the sans-part, or, those whose “proper” place in

society is that of socio-political exclusion. The sans-part sharing in the “Nina’s” anti-

idyll is the demos, the peuple drinking and eating in the collective space of a cabaret, or

laughing, invisible, behind the darkened window of the poet’s closing. The question of

visibility is here crucial, for the poet suspends the operability of the voyeuristic tropes of

misérablisme that depend upon the gaze of a bourgeois subject capable of penetrating,

and describing/inscribing within a network of sexual, demographic, and economic norms,

the space of the poor without there being the slightest contradiction in terms of the

ideology or discourse of private property. Indeed, the distance between the Hugo of “Les

Pauvres gens” or “Souvenir de la nuit du 4,” in many ways the poetic homologue of the

gaze of class domination that one can find in the proliferation of social research enquiries

starting in the 1830s, could not be more acute in this poem. On the contrary, some of its

tropes (i.e., of the horror evoked by the working-classes, their subjective status as both

childish and animal-like) are in fact explicitly evoked with the design of integrating into

the symbolic fabric of the utopia of love these subjects which, according to the law of

lexis, simply do not belong in the lyrical. But here they are part of the last instance of
167
Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” The Cultural Turn: Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-
1998 (London: Verso, 1999), p. 148. We are reminded that for Terdiman, what is at stake in the modernity
of realism, as best exemplified in the novels of Balzac, is not the typical bourgeois bildungsroman telos of
a subject coming to a position of mastery of the world (i.e., the world as a system of transparent signs), but
rather, more often than not, the breakdown of referentiality – determined by social and historical
contradictions – and the subject’s failure to master a given social sign system (i.e., a structure). Cf., Richard
Terdiman, op. cit., pp. 85-116.
 120

laughter that erupts in the poem (before our own), the occasion of a re-evaluation of the

beau, of a poetic “profanation” of hegemonic, or “high,” esthetic forms that gives (a

strange) visibility and audibility to subjects that are usually silenced, occulted, or

marginalized by it (it would thus be coherent to argue that, in many respects, in 1870

Rimbaud is accomplishing in the domain of poetry what Flaubert and Courbet had

already done for the novel and for painting). Indeed, here, the demos are key players in a

new, drôle d’idylle.

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An Exquisite Cadaver: ‘Le Dormeur du Val’, between a (Body)Politics

of Community and an Aesthetic of Absence

Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Bara (1793-4), Musée Calvet, Avignon

La création de la poésie consiste à poser, selon le mode de la sublimation propre à l’art, un objet que
j’appellerais affolant, un partenaire inhumain.
- Lacan, L’Éthique de la psychanalyse

Le soleil ni la mort ne peuvent se regarder fixement.

- La Rochefoucauld, Maximes

Introduction

Perhaps it is the very mark of a “poetic” text that, as the Lacanian epigraph

suggests, the closer and longer one looks at it, (that is, the more one attempts to fix it) the

stranger, the less apparent, the more affolant or indeed inhumain it appears. In this

chapter, we will be reading “Le Dormeur du Val” against a consensual grain which has
 122

for some time staked out a semantic claim to the text that scholars see as unassailable. As

we shall see in some detail, the consensus around “Le Dormeur du Val” is first and

foremost that it is not a pacifist poem. Consequently, for many specialists of Rimbaud’s

work, this consensus almost logically implies that the poem is a militantly engaged one.

Through historical contextualization, genealogical analysis of recent readings of the

poem, a theoretical consideration of the discourse of trauma, and a final close reading, I

argue in this chapter that “Le Dormeur du Val” is a much more ambivalent text than these

critics may be willing to admit. Indeed, their arguments come close to admitting a

nationalist, and indeed biopolitical, reading of the poem that perhaps unintentionally

accounts for its canonization, but that does not seem commensurate with the author’s

esthetic and political enterprise in late 1870.

While “Le Dormeur du Val” resembles on a structural level the poem “Au

Cabaret-vert,” it seems clear that the nature and objective of the poetic subversions of the

sonnet are somewhat different. In “Au Cabaret-vert,” for example, enjambment was

deployed to submit the sonnet to a formal disruption that carried a political charge.

Structural distortion was used to create celebratory critical, erotic, and poetic utterances

where, according to the nineteenth-century disciplinary episteme, there was supposed to

be mere noise; phônè rather than logos, or indeed silence.

With “Le Dormeur du Val,” we are concerned with a silence of an altogether

different nature, one that generates effects of meaning and evokes the possibility of the

subject’s (and meaning’s) radical absence. The text is “shot-through,” as it were, by an

encounter with the utter destruction and mayhem of “History” that does not quite

successfully take place; the referential function of the signifier seems to shudder and
 123

stammer, to break down into a series of excessive rhetorical misdirections at those key

moments where an encounter with the traumatic event precisely fails to take place. The

poem, as Lacan might put it, “ne cesse pas de ne pas s’écrire.”1

The status, implications, and potential readings of the infantia involved in “Le

Dormeur du Val,” with its curiously childish sujet supposé dormir, point rather to the

sleep of ideology, the silence of the grave, and how ideology and war, or death, relate to

one another for the poet. To begin with, then, we shall attempt to make sense of how this

sonnet has traditionally been read. In the course of such a genealogy, we may end up

locating a couple of dead, or rather loose, hermeneutic ends, which will allow us to re-

read this poem that for some time has been taken for lettre morte, unproblematic if not

insignificant. Or, in other words, the problem would be not the poem’s lack of meaning,

but the putative simplicity, the transparent legibility and stability of the poem’s meaning.

Our reading in this chapter may be outlined as follows: in the next section, we

will interrogate the discourse of nationalism during the Terror as it is embodied in

Jacques-Louis David’s painting, La Mort de Bara. From there, we will consider the

critical reception of “Le Dormeur du Val,” where our aim is to show that, if anything, the

interruption of poetic speech and structure in the sonnet suggests a critical dismantling of

nationalism, a rejection of its organicist models of the community, identity, and alterity,

and a vision of fragility qua universal human condition.

Let us begin by taking a brief detour to a fascinating instance of Republican “bare

life”2 – let us begin, in other words by taking a look at a painting made 77 years before

1
Jacques Lacan, Encore: Le Séminaire, livre XX (Paris: Seuil, 1975), cited in Slavoj Žižek, Fragile
absolu: pourquoi l’héritage chrétien vaut-il d’être défendu ? (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), p. 95.
2
I am aware that this pun may strike some readers as highly anachronistic to the extent that Giorgio
Agamben’s homo sacer, or “bare life” is precisely a subject to whom no civil or social category can be
 124

Rimbaud’s sonnet was written, but which nevertheless shares a number of its details,

motifs (e.g., the elision of wounds, the secularized version of an imitatio Christi, etc.),

and ideological aporias. That painting is Jacques-Louis David’s, La Mort de Bara.

I. Epigraph: The Deaths of Joseph Bara

Et vous, infâmes oppresseurs de la terre (…)

où sont vos héros ?
-J.L. David
Report on the“fête héroïque” for Bara and Viala

In mid-December of 1793, the Moniteur Universel3 reported that, during the

session of 25 frimaire, Citizen Barère read aloud to the chamber of the Convention

Nationale (France’s third national assembly since the 1789 Revolution) a letter sent to

him by a certain Citizen Desmarres, commander of the Bressuire section fighting for

control of the Vendée. The contents of the letter relate a successful skirmish against a

much larger force of royalist troops, as well as the death, in the spring of that same year,

of a thirteen year-old boy named Joseph Bara, a poor, young peasant from Palaiseau.

According to the Commandant Desmarres, Joseph Bara was:

trop jeune pour entrer dans les troupes de la République, mais, brûlant de la servir, cet
enfant m’a accompagné, depuis l’année dernière, monté et équipé en hussard : toute
l’armée a vu avec étonnement un enfant de treize ans affronter tous les dangers, charger
toujours à la tête de la cavalerie (...) ce généreux enfant, entouré hier par les brigands, a
mieux aimé périr que de se rendre et leur livrer deux chevaux qu’il conduisait (...)
répondant à celui qui s’était avancé pour les lui faire rendre: ‘A toi, foutu brigand... les
chevaux du commandant et le mien !’ (...) Aussi vertueux que courageux (...) [il] faisait
passer à sa mère tout ce qu’il pouvait se procurer.4

attached. I do see Bara (and, for example, aristocrats, counter-revolutionaries, etc.), however, as
representing precisely this sort of universalization of the subject under the first Republic.
3
The Moniteur Universel was one of the most widely-read daily journals of the French Revolution. As Paul
Hanson points out, “in addition to reporting on general news, (it) presented a daily account of the debates in
the National Assembly.” Paul R. Hanson, The A to Z of the French Revolution (Lantham: The Scarecrow
Press, 2007), s.v. “Moniteur Universel”.
4
“Moniteur Universel du 27 frimaire an II” (17 décembre, 1793), in, Annex: La Mort de Bara: de
l’événement au mythe autour du tableau de David, M.P. Froissy-Aufrère, J.C. Martin, Regis Michel,
Edouard Pommier and Michel Vovelle (Avignon: Musée Calvet, 1989), pp. 142-143.
 125

The commandant Desmarres closes this letter in pleading with the Convention Nationale

to intervene and not let Bara’s “malheureuse mère” (left without resources by the death of

her young son) fall into total indigence. The assembly voted a pension of 4000 livres and

the account of the proceedings of the Convention for the session of 25 frimaire ends

there.5

Of course, Bara’s death doesn’t end here, but rather begins. It was from this letter,

in Desmarres’s stylistically awkward and bombastic prose, that one of the French

Revolution’s more curious martyrs springs forth – from this discourse, relating the event

of Joseph Bara’s death, is (still)born Jacques-Louis David’s famous last martyr portrait

La Mort de Bara.6 Two weeks later, the Moniteur Universel shows that Bara’s death has

already undergone an important discursive (trans)formation, providing the reader a

fascinating glimpse into the logic according to which power begins to lay a political

claim to the body of the child. Robespierre, standing before the Convention Nationale

proclaims:

Je veux parler de Barra (sic), ce jeune home âgé de 13 ans a fait des prodiges de valeur
dans la Vendée. Entouré de brigands qui, d’un côté lui présentaient la mort, et de l’autre
lui demandaient de crier vive le roi! Il est mort en criant vive la République ! Ce jeune
homme nourrissait sa mère avec sa paye, il partageait les soins entre l’amour filial et
l’amour de la Patrie. Il n’est pas possible de choisir un plus bel exemple, un plus parfait
modèle pour exciter dans les jeunes coeurs l’amour (...) de la Patrie (...) vous devez
présenter ce modèle (...) à tous les Français (...) afin qu’ils ambitionnent d’acquérir de
semblables vertus (...). Je demande que les honneurs du Panthéon soient décernées à
Barra (...) que le génie des arts (...) David soit spécialement chargé de prêter ses talens à
l’embellissement de cette fête.7

To this appeal to organize a fête civique in honor of the young Bara, Jacques-Louis David

responds, “Ce sont de telles actions que j’aime à retracer.” But, for many, including

5
Ibid., p. 142.
6
The other two being Michel Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau – a representative assassinated by royalists for
having voted in favor of executing Louis VXI – and Jean-Paul Marat, the (in)famous jacobin journalist
assassinated in his bathtub by a provincial girondin named Charlotte Corday.
7
“Moniteur Universel du 10 nivôse an II,” in, La Mort de Bara, p. 142.
 126

Robespierre, it is not enough to celebrate the young martyr during a day of festival.

Indeed, Barère suggests that “il faut encore tirer de cette mort une leçon vivante pour la

jeunesse de la République.” David is thus commissioned to paint a portrait of the young

martyr of the Republic that, in Barère’s words would be :

tracé par les pinceaux du célèbre David, et que vous devrez exposer dans toutes les écoles
de la République (...) pour y retracer sans cesse à la jeunesse française l’exemple le plus
pur de l’amour de la patrie et de la tendresse filiale.8

From the outset, then, Joseph Bara’s second death, under David’s brushes, is

envisioned in the following terms: a sacrifice for the Nation in peril that is doubly

articulated to enclose both the Fatherland and the family in the same act of filial devotion.

What is abundantly clear from the above citation is that, as Alex Potts points out

ironically, it was rather Robespierre who created the myth of Bara than David:

the cult of the boy-martyr Bara was a carefully fabricated myth, fostered by the Jacobin
government when it was trying to mobilize popular support for an ideology of purified
revolutionary virtue in the months before its overthrow in July 1794.9

Curiously though, and despite evidence demonstrating that Joseph Bara’s afterlife

takes place in the realm of discourse and power – in Robespierre’s speeches and on

David’s canvas – and that his “heroic” death is carefully constructed and recuperated for

ideological purposes, most interpretations of the tableau tend to downplay the question of

power and the child’s relation to it, when they don’t elide it altogether. Michel Vovelle

sees the creation of the cult of Bara as a sort of natural process by which revolutions

secrete myths and heroes, rejecting out of hand interpretations that would see

Robespierre’s or David’s motives for appropriating the body of the dead child as

8
Ibid., pp. 142-143.
9
Alex Potts, “Beautiful Bodies and Dying Heroes: Images of Ideal Manhood in the French Revolution,”
History Workshop 30 (autumn, 1990), p. 4.
 127

anything short of innocent.10 Jean-Clément Martin, despite an otherwise brilliant analysis

of the painting, takes this de-problematization a step further by asserting that, as critics,

we must not be overly concerned with “manipulations politiques (…) n’est-ce pas tout

simplement le rôle du politique que de proposer des exemples à suivre?”11 Warren

Roberts brings the reader to heights where the air of critical analysis becomes

increasingly thin by simply evacuating the question of power and politics from the

painting altogether:

politics is no longer central to the logic [of the painting ] (…). [W]hat is most striking
about Joseph Bara is not its timeliness, but its timelessness (…); the painting (…) is
pristine, elegant of line and shape, and the sinuous form of the androgynous youth is
distant from the world of contemporary politics.12

It seems to me that these sorts of claims are, from a critical and historical perspective,

untenable. For, as Roberts himself documents in detail, David’s political engagement

with the Revolution reached its apex at precisely the same moment that the Convention

commissioned him to paint Bara’s portrait for a fête civique that was only cut short by the

coup of 9 Thermidor. The explicit purpose of Bara’s portrait, in other words, was to serve

as state propaganda at a moment when revolutionary France was facing an external threat

from invading European armies and the combined internal threats of counter-revolution,

factionary divisions in government, and a reign of political Terror that menaced its very

existence. The whole point of La Mort de Bara was to boost the troops’ moral and

encourage citizens to imitate the virtuous sacrifice of Joseph Bara. It thus makes little

sense to de-problematize the questions of power and ideology which seem, historically

and aesthetically, to be at the heart of La Mort de Bara.

10
Michel Vovelle, “L’enfance héroïque sous la révolution française,” in La Mort de Bara, op. cit., p. 36.
11
Jean-Clément Martin, “Bara: de l’imaginaire révolutionnaire à la mémoire nationale,” in, La Mort de
Bara, op. cit., p.106.
12
Warren Roberts, Jacques-Louis David: Revolutionary Artist – Art, Politics and the French Revolution
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp 86-87.
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II. The Infinite Nude and the Naked Truth of the Revolution

Much ink has been spilled in order to account for one of the more immediately

curious aspects of David’s La Mort de Bara, namely, the child cadaver’s nudity. As

obvious as its symbolism may seem, this revolutionary nudity warrants contextualization

and analysis, as this rhetoric of nudity, to borrow Regis Michel’s term,13 may be the point

of entry into an analysis of the logic – and ideological motivations – that subtends an

otherwise relatively un-real portrayal of the child hero of the Terror.

Warren Roberts suggests that an explanation of this ostensible unreality may be

localized in David’s neo-classical aesthetic admixture of hyper-realism and an “utter

disregard of the actual features” 14 of the subjects of his most explicitly political works.

There may indeed be much to say concerning this process of idealizing the terrifying that

runs through David’s revolutionary portraits, a question to be addressed further on.

There exist other accounts for Bara’s nudity, however, which merit mention. They

range from the slightly implausible (i.e., that the child soldier may have been stripped of

his clothing and perhaps even violated by the Vendéean soldiers who killed him),15 to the

13
Regis Michel, “Bara: Du Martyre à l’Ephèbe,” in La Mort de Bara, op. cit., p. 67.
14
Roberts is specifically referring to the triadic martyr portraits that David undertook in the year 1793-1794
of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau, Jean-Paul Marat and, of course Joseph Bara. He notes a stylistic
phenomenon which, in these paintings, simultaneously strives for a hyper-realistic depiction of the event of
political assassination (for example, the attention paid to detailing the wounds of the first two of these
revolutionary martyrs, or, in the case particularly of Marat assassiné, the attention paid to the grain of
wood on the box next to Marat’s bathtub) whilst also idealizing the subjects themselves: that is, either
transforming physical ugliness in life into sublime beauty in death, or transforming what might be
considered the “ugly” circumstances of the subject’s death (particularly the case, as Roberts points out, for
Marat, whom Charlotte Corday killed after receiving reassurances from Marat that he would have 13
Girondins guillotined for suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities) into a metaphor for the Republic’s
boundless, if potentially naïve, generosity and kindness towards its children (i.e., David invents, in his
tableau a purely fictional narrative in which David writes a promissory notice for Corday’s mother just
prior to being stabbed). See, Roberts, op. cit., pp. 81-83.
15
This hypothesis seems to have enjoyed considerable currency in the nineteenth century; nevertheless,
according to Regis Michel, it constitutes a misreading of Bara’s death. For Michel, this reading of Bara’s
 129

slightly more problematic question of the ontological status of the work itself. It is

notoriously difficult to determine whether or not David’s works from this period, with the

exception of his masterpiece of the Terror, Marat assassiné, are even finished – and the

question of the works’ un/finished quality necessarily has informed readings of the works

themselves. This question is further complicated by the fact that David was in the habit of

sketching and, in at least one well-known example,16 painting studies of his subjects in

the nude, adding clothes only in the final stages of a work’s execution. Hence, Bara’s

nudity could be (and has been) read as the trace of a fiasco, so to speak: the child is

merely nude because history got ahead of David, sweeping the Jacobins from power

before his portrait (and the fête civique in honor of Bara and Agricole Viala, which the

National Convention had asked David to organize) could be achieved.17

Jean-Clément Martin reminds us that in 1790 David abandoned an allegorical project

celebrating the city of Nantes, despite having filled a notebook with copious notes on its

nudity destabilizes the heroic and self-sacrificial aspect of the painting that David clearly had in mind when
he undertook its execution in that it permits the spectator to focus solely on the “aspect sordide d’une mort
héroïque”. Hence, the subtext would be the Vendéeans amorality, to the detriment of a reading which
privileges the child as a site of revolutionary sacrifice to be imitated. Michel argues further, in a
surprisingly quite literal reading of the painting, that there would be no point in the Chouan’s theft of a
dead child’s clothes: “les vendéens n’avaient guère le temps de voler l’uniforme du mort, que sa taille
rendait irrécupérable.” See, Regis Michel, art. cit., p. 67.
16
That of the Serment du Jeu de Paume. The sketch of this tableau can be found in the Musée du Château
de Versailles. Another well known example of this technique is that of the études that David sketched for
his Sacre de Napoléon, in one of which the spectator is confronted with a nude Pope Pius VII (musée du
Louvre).
17
This explanation does nevertheless seem historically plausible. Indeed, David was an active member of
the National Convention (presiding over it on a number of occasions) during the Terror whose signature,
according to Warren Roberts, appeared not only on the tableaux for which posterity has recognized his
artistic genius, but also on “almost as many decrees as Robespierre’s” at the apex of the reign of Terror.
(See, Roberts, p. 74.) Given this, as well as David’s imprisonment after the coup d’état of 9 Thermidor, it is
indeed probable that David would not have sought to be publicly any more politically aligned with the
Jacobins (the hard-core of which, Robespierre and Saint-Just, had just been executed) than he already was:
a move that finishing the painting of Bara – who was, after all, designated to the rank of national hero and
destined for the Pantheon by Robespierre – would have certainly accomplished. On Robespierre’s hand in
creating ex nihilo the “culte de Bara,” see his speech from the Convention Nationale, reported in the
Moniteur Universel of 10 nivôse (30 December, 1793), in, La Mort de Bara: de l’événement au mythe, op.
cit., p. 142.
 130

imagined composition. Martin therefore advances the hypothesis that, when taken into

consideration with the divergences between the account of Bara’s death read at the

National Convention and the representation of this same death under David’s brush, the

spectator might read Bara’s nudity as the failed attempt to allegorize the Revolution

similar to that of David’s project for the city of Nantes: “l’inachèvement pourrait alors

être l’impossibilité d’allier la vision allégorique avec les nécéssités de la propagande et

les difficultés de la lutte politique.”18

Whatever the case may be, we are forced to acknowledge, as Regis Michel has

argued, “l’évidence de cette nudité.”19 These readings, though, have one unfortunate

blind-spot that is nevertheless as stark as the child-cadaver’s nudity itself: it isn’t that

Bara is simply nude, but rather that this nudity itself seems to be a significant nudity –

signifying, in its sexual polyvalence, something quite like the Revolution’s ideological

and epistemological project itself. For Bara, in his semiological stripping down, is not

merely an aesthetic accomplishment of the neoclassical genre, though it is that as well.

The representation of the dead, naked child also functions as a sort of fantasy savoir of

the young Republic, namely, the epistemological and hermeneutic dream of rendering the

body of the subject, and thus the being of the citizen, transparent, politically legible.

Hence, David’s portrait of Bara might be understood as an instance of what

Antoine de Baecque sees as Revolutionary France’s imperative to “construct a political

imagination of the body.” In this novel configuration, power seeks to submit a politically

identified body to a “functioning of gazes traversing public space” in order to create a

18
Jean-Clément Martin, art. cit. pp., 98-100.
19
Regis Michel, art. cit., p. 68.
 131

“phenomenon of ‘laying bare’ (of) the political scene.”20 Although de Baecque directs

his attention to the popular press and pamphlets of the early 1790’s, he nevertheless

maintains that an imaginary of purely transparent bodies, which would allow the

Revolution to function like a Foucaldian dream of panoptic power, wholly attaining the

interiority of the individual subject of power, and compelling the private to become

public discourse, was prevalent in Revolutionary France. His analysis of revolutionary

bodies and transparency therefore seems to be a helpful grid through which to peer into

David’s painting, and to begin to think about the nudity of the child-subject as being

located at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology.

This fantasy-gaze of power takes the Platonic aphorism (soma-sema) in a quite

literal sense: the body, in the political imaginary of the Terror, is transformed. It becomes

a signifier (whose signified is nothing less than the politics of the body) in a semiological

economy21 that we may liken to Barthes’s modern traffic code – that is, a system of

signification that permits the “immediate understanding of a small number of signs (…)

[a system which] cannot tolerate any neutralization.”22 At the height of the Terror, the

body is located in a system that sought, on a scale both grandiose and quotidian (from

under the brush of David to between the lines of the political pornography of Parisian

pamphlets and feuilles volantes), to fashion a literal and figurative body politic that was

eminently legible, a body of transparency that “told no lies and kept no secrets,”23 that

was compelled to surrender up the secrets of its interiority to the gaze of power. One

20
Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 245. My italics.
21
This is a theme that Antoine de Baecque has explored in his studies of the French Revolution (The Body
Politic) and of the political and ideological display of cadavers during the Terror (Glory and Terror).
22
Roland Barthes, The Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), p. 84.
23
Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the
Feminine in the French Revolution,” in, Eroticism and the Body Politic, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 121.
 132

might argue that Bara’s nudity functions metaphorically as the imago of what de Baecque

calls the Revolution’s spectacle of transparency. At its apex in the late eighteenth

century, this imperative for power to be able to read the body produces a profusion of

‘physio’ discourses24 that enjoyed a massive popularity in the Revolution because they

allowed a sort of “laying bare [which was] one of the weapons of revolutionary

writing”.25 At stake in this discursive battle where we find Bara is no less than the

survival of the Revolution, and the naked truth of the epistemological enterprise of the

Enlightenment: the creation of, in Michel Vovelle’s terms, the homo novus,26 the blank

slate of subjectivity in rupture with the past, of which David’s Bara is perhaps the most

striking representation.

Hence, if “clothing is politics,”27 as Antoine de Baecque argues, for the

Revolution and its artistic production, might we not just as legitimately read the absence

of clothing in La Mort de Bara as pointing less towards the painting’s “unfinished” status

(and even less to some dubious diegetical event) and more towards an epistemological

fantasy of revolutionary power and its infinite capacity to read the transparent body of its

subjects? This analysis seems all the more compelling given that Bara is not completely

24
The works of Lavater, who established an entire geometry of the face that, in his terms, allowed one to
“connect the internal to the external,” were especially illustrative of this attempt to posit a total knowledge
of the subject based on its appearance. See, de Baecque, op. cit., p. 233.
25
Antoine De Baecque, op. cit., pp. 236-237.
26
Michel Vovelle, La Mentalité Révolutionnaire: Société et mentalités sous la révolution Française (Paris :
Messidor-Editions Sociales, 1985), pp. 99-107.
27
Antoine De Baecque, op. cit., p. 191. This aphoristic formula holds true for the whole of the French
Revolution, and especially as it takes its hard turn towards radicalization in 1793. In the autumn of 1793,
the wearing of the Revolutionary cocarde was made compulsory by decree of the National Convention; at
the occasion of Louis XVI’s execution anyone wearing black was ipso facto a potential
counterrevolutionary. When Marat was assassinated, the color green went quite decisively out of fashion
because it was not only a “rallying color for the Royalists since the beginning of the Revolution, (the color
of the livery of the Comte d’Artois)” but also symbolically stood in for Charlotte Corday, who was
rumoured to have been wearing a green hat when she murdered Marat. Antoine de Baecque, Glory and
Terror: Seven Deaths under the French Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 7.
 133

nude; there is indeed the trace of a “clothing system” (to use Roland Barthes’s term),28

and one that is visually highly symbolic and semiologically highly charged: Bara is

clutching to his heart the revolutionary cocarde.29 The child’s allegiance to the Republic,

therefore, is posited in stark contrast to his nudity, upon which it depends symbolically;

indeed this ideological affiliation linking the child to power becomes all the more legible

precisely because of this nudity.

We must understand the “evidence of this nudity” along with the necessities of

political struggle and the propaganda to which Martin alluded in the above citation. Such

a reading would allow us to locate the problematic of Bara’s nudity at the intersection of

aesthetics and ideology. Far from being, as Roberts argues, an image of the Revolution

from which politics and ideology have been evacuated, the co-incidence of the naked

body and the cocarde functions as a sort of exegetical guideline orienting the gaze of the

spectator towards an ordered, political reading of Bara’s body as a consolidation of

power.30 David’s painting not only situates the body of the child in relation to power, it

also suggests that the body of the child is an important potential node of ideological

filiations and affiliations, a point at which power is symbolized and symbolically

28
Roland Barthes, op. cit., pp. 25-28. Barthes’s understanding of the garment system as being a
semiological system is helpful here precisely because it introduces an element of nuance to de Baecque’s
conceptualization of the body (politic) under the Revolution; it allows for some degree of agency/speech to
take place, even if this parole only ever emerges in the context of a system that, like the clothing system,
was created by a restricted group of arbiters. Nevertheless, in the specific case of La Mort de Bara, we are
not dealing with the “speaking” of the garment system as Barthes understands it (i.e., the wearing of
clothes), but rather with the “model” of the garment system –a question more, then, of the language of the
system than the speaking of it – that Barthes discusses in his Elements of Semiology.
29
On the history of the Revolutionary cocarde two sources are useful. One is Raoul Girardet’s article “Les
Trois Couleurs,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, t. III, Pierre Nora, ed. (Paris : Gallimard, 1997). The other is
Paul Hanson’s The A to Z of the French Revolution, s.v. “cockades”.
30
As Joan Landes points out, republicans were obsessed with the question of the proper “readability” of
images of the Nation and, indeed, the “over-readability” of some images which could potentially be read in
“‘anti-disciplinary’ ways.” Hence, during revolutionary festivals an emphasis was placed on the questions
of limiting, channelling, and foreclosing certain interpretations of allegorical representations so that the
people would read them “correctly”. See, Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation,
and Revolution in Eighteenth Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 35.
 134

reproduced. This political situating of Bara’s body is both metaphorical and literal.

Indeed, in his speech before the Convention Nationale, Robespierre calls not only for a

fête civique in honor of Bara, but a commission d’instruction publique also orders that his

remains should be transported to the Pantheon to rest alongside those of the “great men”

to whom the Fatherland was grateful: “Pour acquitter la dette du Peuple envers cette

victime du bien publique, la Convention, dans sa séance de 18 floréal, a décrété que

l’urne de ce jeune héros serait portée au Panthéon le 30 messidor.”31

Bara’s nudity, however, is far from being the only question raised by this

revolutionary tableau. There is also, perhaps most curiously, the sexuality of the child –

or rather, Bara’s ostensible lack of discernible sexual organs (either male or female),

coupled with the eroticized androgyny of the child itself. As Warren Roberts writes,

commenting on the discursive transformation of the event of Bara’s death:

apart from the cockade and the outline of a flag that barely intrudes into the
picture space on the far left, nothing about the painting suggests a political
content (…) There are no horses, no soldiers, only the curvaceous figure of a
boy who does not appear to be a boy.32

This absence of gender paradoxically points in the direction of and produces a

certain representation of difference. I believe that we can see David’s androgynous child

in a perspective that reveals in the very effacement of gender differences what we might

call a ‘slip of the brush,’ in the sense that Lacan, following Freud, understands slips of

the tongue as vehicles for complex, meaning-full statements.33 But a statement referring

to what, precisely? One hypothesis we might advance is that the destabilization of gender

in La Mort de Bara signposts a deeper anxiety, not only over gendered and political

31
“Moniteur Universel du 24 messidor an II (12 juillet, 1794),” in, La Mort de Bara: de l’événement au
mythe autour du tableau, op. cit., pp.157-158.
32
Warren Roberts, op. cit., p. 85.
33
Sigmund Freud, Psychopathologie de la vie quotidienne (Paris: Payot, 1968); Jacques Lacan, Écrits,
Bruce Fink, trans. (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006), p. 209.
 135

identities (though these are indeed questions to be considered), but stemming from the

“horror vacuii,” that “iconoclastic passion to purge (…) the past” of the Revolution

itself.34

We need, therefore, to see the cadaver of this androgynous child as serving a

discursive purpose, and also a cathartic, or apotropaic, one: it is at once a conjuring up

and away of the fear of the death of the Republic itself. Seen from this perspective,

David’s La Mort de Bara illustrates the tensions pulling at the French Revolution as it

careens into the Terror. David’s La Mort de Bara is perhaps, to borrow from Daniel

Arrasse’s discussion of artists of the Enlightenment, an index of the “dialectical

dovetailing (…) [that] was at the heart of the artistic inspiration of the Enlightenment (…)

the contradictory tendencies (…) [between Lumières et Ténèbres],” the tension between

reason and fear.35 Indeed, if we take La Mort de Bara as forming a kind of utterance,36

our analysis of it needs to take into account the enunciative context and conditions, so to

speak, of the painting. That context is one of a pervasive anxiety – fear – stemming from

the radical rupture with the ancien régime and the forces that this rupture unleashes,

forces that potentially risk undoing the Revolution itself.

Fear – of internal divisions and counter-revolutionary complots, but also of

foreign invasion - leads ultimately to the political reign of Terror, which, as Michel

34
Joan Landes, op. cit., p. 76.
35
Daniel Arasse, “The Artist,” in, Enlightenment Portraits, Michel Vovelle, ed. (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 229-230.
36
Another way of thinking through the painting might be to consider it as a Barthesian “mythic-sign;” that
is, a doubly-tiered system of signification in which the sign of the first tier (i.e., the biological death of a
child named Joseph Bara by Royalist Chouans in the Vendée who wanted his horses) furnishes the signifier
of the second, mythic/ideological tier (i.e., the child sacrificing himself for the Patrie, thereby conferring a
degree of legitimacy upon the Republican socio-political project).
 136

Vovelle states, can itself be understood as a means of regulating fear, a means of

“surmontant la peur, en passant par la violence.”37

David’s Bara, then, isn’t simply an idealized portrait of revolutionary self-

sacrifice. Rather, it accumulates and concentrates both the ideological and aesthetic

positions of the revolution. Hence, we may understand David’s Bara in a triple

perspective: first, as the site of propaganda, designed to inspire hatred of tyrants and an

imitation of Bara’s selflessness (hence, to produce a reiterable republican child-subject);

second, in the accumulation and repetition of neoclassical aesthetic ideals, Bara

constructs an idealized subjectivity “with which the male spectator can identify,”

essentially gendering the “perfect (…) cultural identity” as masculine;38 and finally, in its

depiction of eroticized androgyny, we may see in it a re-presentation of gender anxiety

stemming from the revolution itself.

This last perspective is suggested, in part, by Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s analysis

of the figure of the ephebe in her essays, “Male Trouble” and “The Other Side of Vertu.”

Solomon-Godeau takes the practical step of reminding the reader that the masculine is no

less a socially constructed gender position than the feminine, and that politics under the

Terror became an almost exclusively homosocial affair.39 Hence, this h/erotics, or an

ideal of masculinity that is feminized, is not so much a contradiction of the Rousseauist

37
Michel Vovelle, Combats pour la révolution française (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1993), 221.
Vovelle is not alone in insisting on the importance of “fear” in the French Revolution. On the contrary, fear
is a veritable leitmotif running throughout the historiography on the subject, and indeed, as Vovelle points
out (Combats, 218), one of the first works that the École des Annales produced on the Revolution was
Georges Lefebvre’s La Grande Peur. For Antoine de Baecque, the Revolution can be understood as a sort
of perpetual fear of destructive conspiracies: “denunciations (…) swell to the point of constituting a
dramatic universe in which the Revolution itself is nothing but a giant conspiracy.” See, de Baecque, op.
cit., p. 226.
38
Alex Potts, art. cit., p. 11.
39
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation,” Art History 16:2 (June 1993), pp.
289-290.
 137

cult of masculine virtue, as its outgrowth. Indeed, Solomon-Godeau sees a sort of

“ideological use value”40 in the ambiguous figure of the androgynous ephebe to the

extent that it incorporates difference into “the body of the same.”41 Seen in this light, one

might read La Mort de Bara, and this boy who has the “form of a girl,”42 as a trace of the

process by which “the bourgeois civil sphere” of the Republic increasingly endeavored to

contain and domesticate the feminine and indeed was “structurally constituted through

the exclusion of women.”43

III. The Envious Destiny of Joseph Bara, Puer Novus of the Revolution

Les Français sont tous des Bara

-J.L. David, Discourse to the Convention Nationale

Before we turn to Rimbaud’s “Le Dormeur du Val,” let us make one final remark,

in the form of a rhetorical question, on a curious detail that both Rimbaud’s text and

David’s tableau appear to share. Why this representational pudeur, this repression of the

wound?

Such timidity seems a fortiori anachronistic on a canvas by David, whose

portraits of Lepeletier and Marat functioned as political discourses in their realistic

depiction of, and the imperative of gazing upon, the gaping wound of the

Revolution(ary), of, in de Baecque’s terms, the “glory and terror”44 of the Republic faced

with its own annihilation. This recoiling before the horror of revolutionary violence could

effectively be understood, as Warren Roberts has suggested, as a repression of the trauma

40
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Vertu: Alternative Masculinities in the Crucible of
Revolution,” Art Journal 56:2 (Summer, 1997), p. 56.
41
Ibid.
42
Warren Roberts, op. cit., p. 80.
43
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Vertu,” p. 59.
44
Antoine de Baecque, op. cit., pp. 1-12.
 138

(etymologically, the “wound”) of the Terror.45 This reading, as psychoanalytically

attractive as it may seem, has the disadvantage, however, of seeing Bara as merely a

symptom of the Terror (which it may be), expressing itself despite the artist, and not as

the discursive expression of a Revolutionary project (which it was clearly intended to be).

This project is laid out unambiguously by Robespierre and Barère in their

speeches before the Convention Nationale. David’s portrait would ultimately serve as a

model to be reproduced and hung “dans toutes les écoles de la République,”46

disseminated throughout the Nation in the very institutional spaces in which it forms

subjects and epistemologically reproduces itself. Indeed, we would do well not to lose

sight of the central role that the child played in the epistemological and political projects

of the early Republic. Whether it be in Abbot Grégoire’s linguistic inquiries and

arguments for the political necessity of a national education system, or in the 1793

legislation proclaiming the political equality of bastards and illegitimate children, or

enfants naturels, the French Revolution was fundamentally preoccupied by the question

of the literal enfants de la patrie as ambivalent subjects in a project torn between a logic

of egalitarian progress and a logic of disciplinary power.47

45
Roberts goes perhaps a bit too far with this gesture that, again, fails to account for the specifically
political aspect of the traumatism of the revolutionary Terreur in which David was profoundly implicated.
He argues that this aesthetic discrepancy is the mark of a psychic and artistic schism, a drama within the
artist and his work. Warren Roberts, op. cit., pp. 89-90.
46
“Moniteur Universel du 10 nivôse an II,” in, La Mort de Bara, p. 143.
47
Ivan Jablonka, Les Enfants de la République: l’intégration des jeunes de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil,
2010), pp. 34-47. See also, Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Jacques Revel, Une Politique de la langue
(Paris: Gallimard, 2002). As Jablonka underscores, there remained constitutive pockets of inequality
corresponding in essence to the degree of deviance from the heteronormative family model in question:
natural children could inherit half of what their legitimate siblings got, but on condition that they first be
legally recognized by the father (and this in a period where recherches de paternité were still, of course,
illegal), however children born out of an incestuous, or an adulterous, relationship were accorded no legal
rights whatsoever (children of adulterers were given a small food stipend). Seriously impoverished children
and orphans would become pupilles de la nation according to the language of a 1794 law proposed by
Michel Azéma in order to “ne faire qu’un tout de 27 million de Français,” however, in return, these
children would be expected to express their gratitude to the Patrie (as indeed a group of them did in front
 139

The child is then, perhaps even more than a Marat or a Lepeletier, a symbol of

the Nation – or is, at least, imagined as being potentially more useful to its political

survival. After all, Marat and Lepeletier’s politics could be localized, problematized and,

eventually, refuted. David seems to be politically aware of this problem in as much as, in

his portraits of these two revolutionary cadavers, he centralizes the overwhelming

allegorical importance of discourse, and incrementally collapses the identity of the

subject and textuality: in the surviving engraving of Lepeletier, the representative’s vote

for the death of the king hangs over his lifeless body, traversed by the very blade of the

assassin who took his life; and crucial to Marat is the presence of the Ami du Peuple,48 or

the act of writing as both product and producer of the Revolution.

Bara both prolongs this strategy of representation and simultaneously breaks with

it. The erasure of the violence of Joseph Bara’s death must be understood as an

ideological operation, similar in nature to Robespierre and David’s transformation of

Bara’s supposed last words from the crude, sociolexical “à toi foutu brigand” into a

political opposition, if not indeed a life-or-death conflict between two political regimes,

between “vive le roi” and “vive la République.”49

This metamorphosis is the technique by which the child is put into discourse as

the infans: the child (and its difference) is appropriated by a disciplinary discourse that

naturalizes power while simultaneously attempting to cover the ideological traces of this

appropriation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in David’s La Mort de Bara. Indeed,

of the members of the Convention in 1793). Such expressions of gratitude included the taking of an oath in
which this particularly vulnerable form of vie nue that is the orphan would swear to die for the Fatherland.
Ivan Jablonka, op. cit., p. 46.
48
The conflation of subject and discourse is especially apparent in the case of Marat, whose sobriquet was
the same as the title of his journal: L’Ami du Peuple.
49
La Mort de Bara, op. cit., annex, pp. 142-3.
 140

just as questions of gender difference are displaced in the painting, so are questions of

class division elided. Alex Potts pertinently underscores this point, noting that this Bara

is a figure that is “ideologically highly specific (…) He is the Bara of a radical middle-

class imagination,” a figure whose last dying act becomes one that legitimates power in

the politically monolithic “Vive la République” while effacing the questions of socio-

economic division suggested by the “plebian (…) dying words (…that) would make a

travesty of David’s image.”50 The absence of violence from David’s painting may

perhaps be best understood as a strategy that renders Bara a-political and simultaneously

positions republican politics as universal – as a position, in the image of the Bara of

David’s painting, that is not really positioned at all.

The smallest of details in this painting is capable of transmitting the largest

message. Hence, the presence of a certain textuality, anchoring Bara in a subtle intertext

with David’s two other martyr portraits, is crucial to reading La Mort de Bara, even if

this representation of logos is as illegible as the body itself is legible. By this, we draw

attention to the letter which is interposed between the body of the child and the

revolutionary cocarde.

This text has been the subject of much speculation, but one interpretation that has

gained ground is that the text in the boy’s hand is a letter to his mother, an interpretation

that seems plausible given the recurrent emphasis that Robespierre and, later, David put

on the twin virtues of Bara: l’amour filiale et l’amour de la Patrie.51 The presence of the

letter is a kind of visual echo of David’s portraits of Marat and Lepeletier. And yet it is

all the more curious because it is in the hands of a dead child from the provinces who was

50
Alex Potts, art. cit., p. 14.
51
Regis Michel, art. cit., p. 68.
 141

most likely illiterate. We are faced, then, with a curious posthumous alignment of the

child with logos. Perhaps this detail is less an aporia than an opening up that allows us to

understand the project of the Revolution vis-à-vis the child: simply put, in the

revolutionary economy of images, the child is envisioned as a seamless interweaving of

the maternal, taken as a metonym for the private sphere of the foyer, and the Fatherland.

We would do well to remember Robespierre’s vision of Bara as a model to be imitated,

perhaps best synthesized by this line of verse (to be sung by a choir of children) from

Marie-Jean Chénier’s revolutionary hymn, Le Chant du Départ: “De Bara, de Viala, le

sort nous fait envie/ ils sont morts mais ils ont vaincu.”52 Joseph Bara is imagined as the

point of departure towards a new subjectivity, of a puer novus whom the Republic will

mould to become the homo novus, willing to mobilize his body, and even give up his life,

for the body politic of the Fatherland.

Bara represents an important turning point in which the relationship between

power and the subject is radically re-thought. In this new relationship, the subject is no

longer linked to power on the basis of genealogy (the model of the ancien régime), but

rather through the mode of ideology and affiliation. In this new schema, the child-subject

is positioned as a virtual relay of power, or, at the very least, a point of entry for power

into the private sphere of the subject. In this respect, La Mort de Bara seems to point

towards the nineteenth-century, with its development, institutionalization and

proliferation of discipline in a network of, to quote Jacques Donzelot, tutelary complexes

(such as schools and entities of urban philanthropy). These instances of discipline

furnished the foundations of nineteenth-(and twentieth-) century political apparatuses,

52
Reproduced in, J.F. Dominé, “‘Le Chant du Départ’de M.J. Chénier et Etienne Méhul,” Annales
Historiques de la Révolution Française, p. 98.
 142

spreading throughout France and transforming children into “agents for conveying the

norms of the State into the private sphere.”53

IV. Some Hermeneutical Problems in “Le Dormeur du Val”

A survey of the scholarship done on the tensions between community and

universality, identity and nationalism (to say nothing of the politics of “sacrifice”), might

at first glance seem to indicate that, at best, there is precious little that hasn’t already been

explored and theorized in the dense field of historical and literary analysis that takes

Rimbaud and the upheavals of the year 1870-1871 as its domain. Bibliographies devoted

to the Franco-Prussian war, the Commune and Rimbaud’s poetry written in the past fifty

years or so could fill a volume and the poem “Le Dormeur du Val” is so thoroughly a

fixture of the French canon that it constitutes something of a true poetic north. It is a text

that most French school children are exposed to by the age of ten, and that has figured in

anthologies of French poetry since the end of the nineteenth century.

In these pages, I propose that we re-read Rimbaud’s poem at a median point

between context and text, as an esthetic re-working and remembering of the upheavals

and traumatisms of l’année terrible. By paying attention to the semio-poetic techniques at

work in the sonnet, I believe we can come to an understanding of the poem that not only

does not seek to resolve its internal aporias but that maintains the crucial ambivalences of

what I conceptualize as a “poetraumatics” – that is, a faltering of the poetic verb and form

generates critical and oppositional statements at the intersection of the dit and a comment-

dire. Such a reading may ultimately have the added benefit of pointing towards ruptures

53
Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p.
58.
 143

and revolts to come on the poetic horizon of Rimbaud’s oeuvre, of positing this poem as

the site of an (opening up of an) important poetic revolt and memory, of repeating and

reiterating and the breaking down of poetic forms that not only constitutes one of the

more pertinent traits of Rimbaud’s literary politics, but that takes place well before the

innovations and revolutions of the spring and summer of 1871.

With respect to the “Dormeur’s” relationship to the larger field of poetic discourse

in the late 1860s and early 1870s, it is important to signal here that this is a rich domain

for study indeed – one that has been successfully mined elsewhere by critics doing

invaluable philological work. Though we will discuss at least one of these fascinating

cases further on, let us briefly consider an important transition in the texture of lyrical

voice and status of “Nature” within lyrical discourse. Jean-Pierre Bobillot was amongst

the first to identify this transformation of the representation of “Nature” in the canon of

nineteenth-century French poetry.54

For Bobillot, the “Dormeur” constitutes a hypotextual – and deeply polemical –

reworking of Lamartine’s “Le Vallon” that wrenches the latter from its reassuring

mystico-romantic cosmology and, I would add, crucially divests the poetic text itself of

any lyrical foyer de sens, any organizing center of subjectivity from which meaning can

be generated and consolidated.55 Note for example, the following passage, which is

indeed at once a clear intertextual source for the “Dormeur” and yet one from which the

Rimbaldian text diverges:

Ah ! c'est là qu'entouré d'un rempart de verdure,

D'un horizon borné qui suffit à mes yeux,
J'aime à fixer mes pas, et, seul dans la nature,

54
Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Rimbaud: le meurtre d’Orphée (Paris : Champion, 2004).
55
Ibid., pp.195-200. See also, Ibid., “Les Insipides, ou comment Rimbaud n’a jamais appris (qu’)à
réécrire,” in Modèles linguistiques XXXI 60, Daniel Bilous, éd. (Toulon: Editions des Dauphins, 2010), pp.
93-114.
 144

A n'entendre que l'onde, à ne voir que les cieux.

J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie ;

Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé.
Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l'on oublie :
L'oubli seul désormais est ma félicité.56

We find here, for example, the syntagmatic structure that provides the first

hemistiche of Rimbaud’s poem, “c’est + noun + preposition/complement + substantivized

color (i.e., verdure),” with the protective rampart of Nature subverted by the crucial,

lexically, phonetically, semantically, and structurally disturbing “trou”; and, of course,

we would be hard pressed not to remark that the lyrical “je” disappears altogether from

“Le Dormeur du Val” – an absence, accompanied by an even more fundamental shift in

the isotopic representation of Nature that importantly poses as utterly impossible any

fusion between the natural and the human.

What I’d like focus on in the following reflection is precisely the ambivalent

posture that the poem adopts with respect to a particular form of violence – i.e., that of

modern, international warfare – and to the ideological configurations and iterations of

nationalism that would naturalize such violence. The poem may not be a monovalently

pacifist text, but it is not a belligerent one either. In other words, if the “Dormeur” is far

from an innocent victim, poetically slaughtered for the benefit of a pacifist beautiful-soul

lamenting the disaster of history, what this poem also accomplishes is the impossibility of

capturing and immobilizing the figure of the anonymous soldier in a nationalist

discourse. To the contrary, “Le Dormeur du Val” puts into question the object and telos

of immobilizing the mobilisé pour by leaving us with a deafeningly silent pour-quoi?; it

56
Alphonse de Lamartine, Méditations poétiques (Paris: Librairie Henri Nicolle, 1820), p. 32.
 145

interrogates the very gesture by which the beauty of the dead is mobilized and inscribed

in a project that solidifies a “natural” – or biopolitical – community.

It is a complex and ultimately questionable interpretative maneuver to transform

the central figure of the poem into a (or any) Master-Signifier bestowing meaning upon

the traumatic encounter with radical absence. Rather, we should insist on the richly

textured and strategically constructed ambiguity of this text – on its rhetorical

evasiveness and its formal violence. Our hypothesis, then, is the following: “Le Dormeur

du Val” represents a crucial moment in the corpus of late-1870 poems by Rimbaud.

Poetically embodying the historical trauma of the Franco-Prussian war in the sonnet, “Le

Dormeur” marks something of a stylistic point of rupture in which the rhetorical

representation of Nature is rendered unheimlich. As such, it is a text that anticipates the

performative violence of the later zutist poem, “Paris” (which will be discussed in chapter

3).

V. Context: Rimbaud and the Sonnet in 1870

A remark on the situation of the sonnet in Rimbaud’s verse work from 1870 is in

order.57 First of all, as Michel Murat reminds us, not only does the sonnet predominate as

a fixed poetic form in Rimbaud’s early work, statistically speaking it is a form that

Rimbaud uses more than any other (of the 22 texts from 1870, 12 are sonnets). Rimbaud

is thus, as Murat puts it, a veritable “maître du sonnet” who experiments with and

57
For a closer analysis of structural transgressions having to do with the purity of the césure and the use of
enjambments à l’entrevers, see supra, “In Democracy’s Green Cabaret”.
 146

transforms the sonnet before essentially moving away from it by 1871 in favor of less

regular metrical forms, and ostensibly abandoning it altogether by 1872.58

When Rimbaud crafted his sonnets in 1870-71, he appeared to have done so with

one eye on what would have passed for an intentionally provocative and subversive

version of the sonnet. For, in 1870, the sonnet as a forme fixe was governed by a series of

normative parameters. To write a canonical sonnet, the rhyme schema had to follow a

pattern of embracing rhymes that are consistent in the quatrains (i.e., ABBA ABBA), and

then the following disposition for the tercets: CC DEDE.59 Slightly less normative,

without falling for as much into the category of structurally poetic deviance was the

regular sonnet, in which one could find a total of two different rhymes in the quatrains

and any combination (except rime plate) in the tercets. Last of all, there is the sonnet

libertin – a sonnet composed of four different rhymes, in varying disposition (with the

exception of rime plate, which would in fact result in a pseudo-sonnet) that was given

massive pride of place in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (41 out of 76 sonnets from Les

Fleurs du Mal are libertine sonnets).60 The Rimbaldian sonnet from 1870 is thus in a

clear hypotextual relationship to Baudelaire’s work, and indeed to what many of that

poet’s contemporaries found most esthetically shocking, jarring, and modern in his work.

Murat is right to underscore the extent to which this form is “exceptionnel avant

Baudelaire” and didn’t fail to strike even the poet’s friends and admirers as a paradoxical,

58
Michel Murat, “Rimbaud et la poétique du sonnet,” Parade Sauvage 13 (March, 1996), pp. 5-6. In a
recent, insightful reading of Alfred de Musset’s sonnets, Steve Murphy demonstrates a loosening up, if not
undermining of the medial position in the alexandrine can easily be found in Musset’s second “Sonnet”
from Premières Poésies. One is almost tempted to ask if, in terms of poetic technique, Rimbaud isn’t more
of a “romantic” than one is ready to admit. See Steve Murphy, “Musset, ‘Quatorze fois exécrable’?: lecture
méthodique d’un ‘Sonnet’,” Études françaises 41 :3 (2005), pp. 81-95.
59
Alternative rhyme structures in the tercets, such as CC DEED, would have been perfectly acceptable and
even legibile as a conservative variation of the rhyme disposition in the sonnet’s last six verses in the
nineteenth century.
60
Michel Murat, art. cit., p. 6.
 147

if not incomprehensible, formal choice.61 Murat reminds us that, in 1870, we would be

seriously mistaken to think that Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville are

hopelessly behind the poetic times. Rather, when Gautier writes that Baudelaire’s

decision to place such insistent emphasis on the lyrically subversive deviance of the

sonnet libertin is illogical for such a talented poet, especially given that the sonnet is a

“forme rigoureuse qui n’admet aucun écart, aucun caprice,” it’s because, as Murat puts it,

“[a]u moment où Rimbaud devient poète, Baudelaire est loin de faire école.”62

In “Le Dormeur du Val,” as in two other sonnets from approximately the same

period that touch on the theme of warfare,63 we are dealing with the formally subversive

libertine sonnet. A hermeneutic drift may have occurred around the cluster of “war texts”

written in the fall of 1870, “Le Dormeur du Val,” “Le Mal,” and “Morts de quatre-vingt-

douze…”. Indeed, it’s possible that the latter poem’s metaphorical proximity to “Le

Dormeur du Val” has simply overwhelmed recent and not so recent readings of the text.

In the opening line of the tercets of “Morts de quatre-vingt-douze…,” for instance, the

death of the soldiers of the Revolutionary army, and indeed the death of the Republic, is

compared to a slumber (itself, a well-known, if not clichéd, periphrasis for “death”). This

detail has led specialists of Rimbaud’s work to argue that the only coherent exegesis of

the “Dormeur” is to see it as a similar prise de parti for the Republic, an appeal for its

61
Ibid.
62
Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Jean-Luc Steinmetz, ed. (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1991), p. 80, cited in
ibid., p. 7. Writing on the occasion of Baudelaire’s death in 1867, Vallès gives us an anecdotal and frankly
somewhat amusingly alienating (for the contemporary reader of the French literary canon) sense of just
how far Baudelaire was from being the figure-head of a poetic “école”. Vallès seems to have had little
personal appreciation for Baudelaire, whom he describes as a kind of affected, absurd hybrid, somewhere
between a “prêtre” and a “cabotin” (with more “cabotin” than “prêtre”); his appreciation for Baudelaire’s
writing is even more severe and (again, in retrospect) unintentionally amusing: “Il eut une minute de gloire,
un siècle d’agonie; aura-t-il deux ans d’ ‘immortalité’? – A peine!” Jules Vallès, “Charles Baudelaire,”
Littérature et révolution (Paris: Les Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1969), pp. 322-30.
63
I.e., “Le Mal” and “Morts de quatre-vingt-douze…”.
 148

defense at a time when it was assailed from all sides by the invading Prussian army and

politicians who, like the Parti de l’Ordre of the Second Republic, could hardly be

accused of having deeply-seated republican convictions (even if they ultimately did end

up being the vectors of what Marx called the “irony of History” – that is, their internal

divisions arguably eventually led to the solidification of the Republic as a viable and

relatively stable form of government by 1875-1879).64

Our analysis of “Le Dormeur du Val” depends on a reading of this text as a sonnet

in alexandrines. Thus, we have interest in dispelling the curious – if recurrent for some

critics – hypothesis that Rimbaud would have been somehow simply unaware of the

profoundly subversive nature of the formal poetic choices he made. We would do well, in

this regard, to recall two important points articulated elsewhere by Jean-Pierre Bobillot

and Benoît de Cornulier. For the former, it is absolutely crucial (i.e., if one wishes to

avoid tendentious or paraliptical readings of the texts from this early period of

production) that we understand the structural dislocations and lexical dissonances in the

sonnets of late 1870 in a properly sociocritical light; that is, as so many “instantanés

rageurs, pleins de haine et de compassion prenant pour cibles (…) ceux qu’il tenait pour

hautement responsable du massacre et de ce surgissement de barbarie” throughout what

has become known as the année terrible.65

Second, with respect to the notion that these semantic, lexical, and structural

revolutions in the sonnet are somehow the accidental product of a young poet who simply

64
Cf., Jean-Pierre Bobillot’s, Rimbaud: le meurtre d’Orphée, op. cit., pp.195-200 and his “Rimbaud,
Thiers, Pétain et les autres,” in Europe 87:966 (October 2009), pp. 77-8. ; Jean-François Laurent, “Le
Dormeur du val, ou la chair meurtrie qui se fait verbe poétique,” in, Rimbaud à la loupe: Actes de colloque,
2 (Charleville: Musée-Bibliothèque Rimbaud, 1990), pp. 21-27; and Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la
ménagerie impériale (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991), pp. 47-53, 95-105, and especially 179-
205 ; see also his recent Rimbaud et la Commune: Microlectures et perspectives (Paris: Classiques-Garnier,
2010), pp. 110-19.
65
Jean Pierre Bobillot, op. cit., p. 45.
 149

didn’t know how to write a “proper” line of verse, let us consider Benoît de Cornulier’s

statistico-metric analysis of the 1870 corpus. De Cornulier concludes his metrical survey

by suggesting that, with the exception of the sonnets from this year, 99.2 % of all the

texts Rimbaud wrote in this period were uniform from the standpoint of their stanzas,

rhymes, and meter (out of a total of 1,760 lines of verse, the .8% deviation represents the

inverted rhymes in triolets of “Le Coeur volé”).66 Indeed, when it comes to the rhyme

pairs and disposition of the non-sonnet poems of 1870, de Cornulier states emphatically

that, from a formal point of view, they are amongst the most typical of “regular poetry”

of the era.67 The conclusion to be drawn from the scholarship surrounding the genealogy

and norms of versification and Rimbaud’s verse poems is that we are dealing with, as

Michel Murat aptly put it, not only a master of the sonnet, but indeed a “maître du vers,

dans la lignée romantique et parnassienne, un rhetoricien de la poésie qui dans ses

meilleurs moments ne le cède en rien à Hugo.”68 In final analysis, Rimbaud’s textual

production dating from the period of “Le Dormeur du Val” was consciously engaging

with, in order to question and disrupt its pervasive sense of self-evidence, a certain

hegemony of form, that is, the rules through which poetic discourse was mediated,

66
Benoît de Cornulier, “Sur la métrique des ‘premier vers’ de Rimbaud” in Rimbaud à la loupe, op. cit., p.
5
67
Ibid., p. 7.
68
Michel Murat, art. cit., pp. 5-6. George Hugo Tucker has argued that Rimbaud was not only an
exceptional latinist, but that he frequently imported Latin into French poetry as a way of deterritorializing
the latter. In a similar vein, Benoît de Cornulier has argued that it is absolutely crucial to insist on a regular
6-6 reading of the majority of Rimbaud’s alexandrines, rather than opting for the perhaps superficially
more logical trimètre romantique in, for example, “Le Bateau Ivre”. Insisting on a 6-6 meter draws out
structural transgressions at the caesura in the following line: “Je courus! Et les Péninsules démarrées,”
where the caesura intervenes within the sememe “Pén/insules”. However, as de Cornulier reminds the
reader, anyone with an eye sharp enough to pick up on compound etymologies would be capable of
recalling the Latin etymon of “peninsula” as paeane + insula, or “presqu’île”. See, Benoît de Cornulier,
“Pour une approche de la poésie métrique au XIXe siècle,” Romantisme 140 (2008), p. 43.
 150

legitimated itself, generated meanings and norms, and reproduced itself.69 The first rule

of this type of oppositional intervention that brings modes of symbolic production (e.g.,

poetry) into the domain of ideology (i.e., class conflict), that reveals the dialogical nature

of what Jameson calls hegemonic forms,70 that manifests their essential status as

moments of and objects in an antagonistic struggle,71 is that one knows what one is

doing. This is what Terdiman refers to as the “strategic location of writers, and of the

practice of writing”72 – namely, one has to first know how (dominant) discourses are

constructed in order to undermine them or reveal their role in the legitimation and

marginalization of certain forms and subjects of discourse.

“Le Dormeur du Val” is an early sonnet in alexandrines,73written most probably

sometime in the late summer of 1870. It is important to keep this metrico-formal detail in

mind, for some critics have disputed the status of the alexandrine in this poem, arguing

that the syntaxico-accentual scansion of certain lines of verse (notably the last:

“Tranquille. – Il a deux trous rou – ges au côté droit.”) ought to properly be read as

romantic trimeters, or even as a dodecasyllable separated in one hemistiche of two

69
We recall that in Richard Terdiman’s discussion of Baudelaire it is precisely through the same sorts of
discursive mechanisms that dominant social configurations are perpetuated. See his, Discourse/Counter-
Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 54. See also, Nathan Wing, The Limits of Narrative: Essays on
Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 115.
70
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 86-7.
71
Ibid., p. 97.
72
Richard Terdiman, op. cit., p. 51.
73
The “alexandrine” is a sonnet composed of two stanzas of quatrains and two tercets written in
dodecasyllabes. Up to the end of the nineteenth century it was, as Jacques Roubaud has pointed out, the
form of French poetic expression, belonging since the eighteenth century to what Michèle Aquien refers to
as “[le] style noble.” See Jacques Roubaud, La Vieillesse d’Alexandre: Essai sur quelques états récents du
vers français (Paris : François Maspero, 1978), pp. 19-35. See also Michèle Aquien, La Versification
(Paris: PUF, 2006), pp. 29-30. See also, Jean-Michel Gouvard La Versification (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1999) ; and Benoît de Cornulier, Théorie du vers: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé
(Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp. 145-211, 245.
 151

syllables and a second of ten syllables.74 De Cornulier and Bobillot have rejected such

readings, arguing for a 6 – 6 reading of this sonnet, that is, in alexandrines. De Cornulier

perspicaciously underscores the crucial syntaxico-structural discordance generated by the

suspension of the sememe “rouges” when it is “rejected” into the seventh position of the

line, enjambing the caesura and creating a cacophonous sort of couac (trou - rou)

belying the putative “tranquility” of the final line, and indeed of the poem itself:

Pourtant, dans une interprétation, disons, pépère, bien en accord avec la rythmisation
moderne molle (amétrique) de ‘Tranquille – il a deux trous rouges – au côté droit,’ il
n’est pas évident que l’adjectif ‘rouges’ apporte grand-chose d’interéssant dans: ‘deux
trous rouges’; ne serait-il pas assez clair de dire que ce corps de soldat abandonné, dont la
tranquillité est bien inquiétante, ‘a deux trous au côté droit? A quoi bon focaliser
métriquement, et cela à la pointe même du sonnet, un prédicat de couleur impliquant que
les plaies évidemment mortelles sont saignantes (…) ? On se contentera ici de remarquer
que l’attention favorisée par le rejet métrique des ‘trous (…)’ commence à se justifier par
renvoi du dernier hémistiche au premier [i.e., ‘C’est un trou de verdure’] du sonnet (…) ;
la répétition du mot ‘trou’ peut être d’autant plus sensible à certains lecteurs métriques
que, comme le rappelait Boileau dans son Art poëtique, Apollon avait ‘défendu’ qu’un
mot déjà employé dans un sonnet ose ‘s’y remonter’.75

We shall come back to the question of this “tranquility,” for it has continued to

pose a problem of hermeneutic (or even ideological) consistency for readers of this poem.

In sum, de Cornulier has identified the key to the problem of the poem’s interpretation

without entirely unpacking its implications. To my mind, the key to “unlocking” the

poem resides in the poem’s repetitive use of enjambment and in a stylistic dislocation of

lyrical language that extends into the domain of the minimal units of language, the

phonemes. In the poem’s last line of verse, which is traditionally the site in a sonnet

where meaning is revealed, the anaphoric redundancy of the “trous” echoing the “trou de

verdure” of the first line effectively locks the poem into a figural and hermeneutic loop of

repetition. Furthermore, this metonymical “trou” (i.e., designating warfare, death,

74
Jean-Pierre Bobillot mentions such readings before, de Cornulier à l’appui, refuting them as readings that
are legitimately possible but which would be strictly a-metrical. Bobillot, op. cit., pp. 32-35.
75
Benoît de Cornulier, “Rimbaud: Chercher son rhythme,” Europe 87:966 (Octobre, 2009), pp. 188-9.
 152

decomposition of the human/lyrical form) fails in a rather interesting way to disclose the

poem’s “final” signified.

Another question that merits attention is that of the poem’s date, for the

exegetical consensus that has rejected “pacifist” readings of “Le Dormeur” tends to

depend upon accepting that the poem was either written or revised in late October,

1870.76

Let us therefore consider the reception of this text and try to account for two

textual problematics that continue to punch the occasional hole in theoretical and close

readings of the poem. Primo: what is its stance with respect to the immediate historical

context of the carnage of the Franco-Prussian war and the enthusiasm that ripped through

the socialist and republican left in France upon the fall of the Second Empire? Secundo:

what kind of signified are we to attribute to the dead soldier in this text? What is its

ideological valence? Is it a Christic figure? If so, what kind of larger (political) discursive

field is it activating? Is there a residue of transcendence in this text, and, if so, does it

reside in the figure of the soldier, in the army, or in the nation? Might we not read it as

the inscription of a traumatic encounter with a beyond of language itself? If so, what

consequences does this have for the lyrical form, to say nothing of forms of lyrical and

political subjectivity?

VI. A Brief Genealogy of Some Hermeneutic Tendencies

For the time being, I’d like to briefly discuss the reception of the text, for recent

readings of the text continue to be haunted by the unacknowledged ambiguity of the

76
The poem itself was first published, unbeknownst to its author, in an 1888 anthology of poetry, in the
double aftermath of Verlaine’s Poètes Maudits and Gustave Kahn’s publication of Les Illuminations in La
Vogue.
 153

poem’s decomposing central figure. In sum, current exegeses of “Le Dormeur du Val”

are right to insist on the importance of the poem’s historical and polemical context; they

are indeed right to underscore the presence of a kind of Christological imaginary; and

they are ultimately right to suggest that, as readers of the text, we must be willing to

gamble that the meaning it puts forth may be a kind of “hypothetical imperative”

advocating political engagement for the Republic. Yet it remains to be seen which

Republic is in question. In the margins of these readings, my own shall nevertheless insist

on the text’s ambivalences (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term). Our task will be to

concentrate on those nodal points in the poem where its message is complicated to such a

degree that the lyrical subject itself is decentered by a compulsive rhetoric of silences, is

rendered infans. Though the question of biography is a theoretically rich one, I do not

believe it is helpful to see the traumatic encounter in question as belonging to the order of

strict biographical events. Rather, I believe it belongs to the sort of upheaval

characteristic of what we might call an encounter with the historical (i.e., modern

warfare) or existential (i.e., the realization of radical finitude) Real – the encounter with

something that resists symbolization, but which nevertheless insists on an engagement for

which there is no guarantee of success. On the level of purely abusive analogies, then,

there is a comparison to be made between this poem and any imaginable event that we

might call a “lost cause,” be it political, such as in an uprising that appears ostensibly to

be a priori doomed to fail, or personal, as in psychoanalysis.

“Le Dormeur du Val” was included in a number of texts that Rimbaud dropped

off on Paul Demeny’s doorstep in October of 1870. Indeed the date “Octobre 1870”

figures at the bottom of the manuscript of “Le Dormeur du Val”. Even if we are
 154

extremely justified in bringing a healthy dose of cautious, editorial skepticism when it

comes to accepting the dates Rimbaud ascribed to his texts, such a paratextual detail

suggests that, whenever the poem was written, the deeply fraught political context of

post-Empire (if not quite entirely Republican) France was on the poet’s mind.77

It is no easy task to ascertain precisely when, and under what “archeological”

conditions, in the tradition of the “Dormeur’s” reception, a monovalently pacifist reading

emerged and was stabilized.78 It is perhaps no wonder, and indeed no coincidence that in

the post-war context of Gaullist amnesia and European reconstruction of 1950s-60s

France that the profound ambivalences and indeed politically combative subtext of “Le

Dormeur du Val” might be passed over in silence in favor of the angélisme of a

politically neutral pacifism. However, as Murphy suggestively argues, it is very likely

that such readings abound at least as early as the period of the First World War,

particularly in the context of intermittent and politically informed resistance on the part

of common soldiers. Murphy reminds us of the importance the poem had for André

Breton while he was enlisted as a psychiatrist in the frontlines of the war, and he points

out that in that precise historical context, openly proclaiming affection for such a poem

ran the risk of appearing highly subversive in the most politically engaged sense of the

term.79

77
One thing we know about Rimbaud is that he played a little loose when dating his works. For instance, he
apparently dated his “Forgeron” – a long verse historical verse poem relating the storming of Versailles by
the Parisian “crapule” – as “4 septembre,” a date that coincides neatly with the fall of the Second Empire
but which also coincides with Rimbaud’s stay in Mazas prison. Cf., inter alia, Steve Murphy’s study of this
poem (“Fictions Révolutionnaires”) in his, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op. cit., pp. 209-26.
78
Steve Murphy mentions a tradition of pacifist interpretations that he critiques in his Rimbaud et la
ménagerie impériale, op. cit., pp. 187-205.
79
For a somewhat indirect sense, coming to us from the domain of popular culture, of the temperature and
tone of micro-practices of resistance to the war around the period of 1915-16, see the song “La chanson de
Craonne”. For the reference to Breton (the text in question is Nadja), see Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la
menagerie impériale, op. cit., p. 187.
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The least we can say is that, in the fall of 1870, such readings of the text might

have been unlikely for Rimbaud’s contemporaries, if not for the poet himself. As Murphy

points out, Rimbaud’s poem was apparently published in the ultra-republican regional

journal, Le Progrès des Ardennes, a newspaper that Rimbaud’s friend, Ernest Delahaye,

described as a “journal démocratique (…) que lisaient avec satisfaction toutes les

personnes mal-pensantes du département,” whose main objective was a “défense

militante de la République.”80 Thus, in opposition to a stabilization of “Le Dormeur du

Val” grounded in a hermeneutics and politics of anti-militarism, a counter-discourse on

the text has emerged amongst specialists of Rimbaud that resists what we might call the

evacuation of the poem’s political subtext from the text itself. For indeed, it is not merely

a question of breaking-down open doors: if Jean-Pierre Bobillot and others are right,

pacifist readings of the poem not only persist, but advance their own anti-Republican

ideological agenda under the hypocritical cover of staking-out a “non-ideological”

reading of Rimbaud’s work.81

Yet, by a curious kind of irony, anti-pacifist readings of “Le Dormeur du Val”

remain determined by the object they set out to refute in the first place, and seem

especially unable to resolve the ambivalences of the text that were first raised by the very

pacifist readings they qualify as naïve or tendentious. It is to them that we shall now turn.

80
The hypothesis of a publication in 1870 remains unverifiable. The archives of this journal were entirely
destroyed by a fire and no copy of the journal is publically available (though one could conceivably exist in
a private collection). Frédéric Eigeldinger and André Gendre, Delahaye témoin de Rimbaud (Paris: La
Baconnière, 1974), p. 92, cited in Steve Murphy, op. cit., p. 191. Cf. also, Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la
Commune: microlectures et perspectives (Paris: Garnier-Classiques, 2009), p. 113.
81
Jean-Pierre Bobillot addresses this problem in his, “Rimbaud, Thiers, Pétain et les autres,” Europe
87:966 (October 2009), pp. 77-8.
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Along with contemporary critics of her day such as Étiemble, and to a certain

degree Claude Duchet,82 Enid Starkie hardly considered “Dormeur du Val” to be one of

Rimbaud’s finest works in verse. Nevertheless, like Étiemble, who by 1954 had already

remarked upon a certain pacifist doxa surrounding the “Dormeur,”83 Enid Starkie was

perhaps one of the first not only to affirm that the “Dormeur” is an important anti-

bellicist work, but to assert, furthermore, that the genesis of the text can be traced back to

an actual, biographically confirmable encounter with the cadaver of a soldier from the

Franco-Prussian war. For Starkie, such an encounter would have occurred sometime

during the adventures in vagabondage which led him from Charleville to Charleroi, and

then to a Parisian prison in the early autumn of 1870 (Starkie, who was also the first to

claim that Rimbaud was a slave-trader in Eastern Africa during the 1880s, makes this

claim without the slightest equivocation or proof, for that matter).84

With Claude Duchet, however, the matter is not so clear, and his reading of the

poem is thereby far richer. For his part, while at times certainly more circumspect in his

appraisal of the text’s relation to Rimbaud’s biography (i.e., the two fugues that the poet

went off on in late August and then again in early October of 1870) and indeed to the

larger historical context of the Franco-Prussian war, Duchet nevertheless cannot quite

seem to pull his reading away from a kind of biographico-contexual determinism. His

82
Along with Emilie Noulet, who preceded his own study of the text by about a decade, Duchet deserves
particular notice for an explication of the biographical situation of (to say nothing of the careful
philological work identifying a series of important intertextual sources for) “Le Dormeur du Val” that is in
and of itself quite interesting and at times compelling. See Emilie Noulet, Le Premier Visage de Rimbaud:
Huit poèmes de jeunesse (Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Oiseau Bleu, 1953), pp. 59-67 ; Claude Duchet, “Autour
du ‘Dormeur du Val’ de Rimbaud,” in Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 62 :3 (Juillet-Septembre,
1962), pp. 371-80.
83
Étiemble, op. cit., p. 99.
84
“In the ‘Dormeur du Val’ (…) we find that quality of compassion which is a feature of Rimbaud’s
personality and work. The sleeper (…) is a soldier lying dead under the trees in the valley, whom Rimbaud
must have seen on his wanderings.” Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (New York: New Direction Books,
1961), p. 67. Cited in, Claude Duchet, art. cit., p. 371.
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claims are more nuanced than Starkie’s, but they perhaps differ more from hers in degree

rather than kind. Duchet contends that the poem probably could have been written

without the poet happening across a cadaver in the Ardenno-Belgian countryside,85 only

to abandon this prudence later on and affirm that the poem “suggère une rencontre réelle

(…); [l]e sonnet (…) est (…) trop précis (…) pour avoir été conçu sans le support d’une

impression ou d’un souvenir.”86

The most fascinating aspect of Duchet’s reading of the “Dormeur,” however, is

his symptomatic penchant for taking one step in a potentially rich analytic direction, and

then two steps back in the direction of meaning as governed by authorial intent or

subjective experience. The potential intertextual sources for the “Dormeur” that Duchet

identifies are so compelling as to push his reader in a direction that is merely (half-)

suggested in his own argument, namely, that the residue, or memory, or impression, that

may have been at the “source” of the text is not an event as such in the poet’s extra-

literary biography, but rather the event of reading; the encounter with other texts

experienced as dead-letters.

In other words, part of the poem’s persistent complexity can be attributed to the

fact that it is located in the palimpsestial domain of a literary problematic where one

writer is re-writing, inscribing in a different register, an other text or series of texts. The

85
Duchet devotes a lengthy footnote, for example, to the flora of the Ardennes region to support the
hypothesis that the poem’s flowers (e.g., cresson, glaieuls) are referential ones. Murphy and Laurent’s
etymological take on these flowers yield significantly more fruitful analysis. Cf., Claude Duchet, art. cit.,
pp. 376-7, n. 5, 1.
86
Ibid., pp. 371, 375. Here, I diverge from Steve Murphy’s reading of Duchet. Murphy locates Duchet
within the exegetical genealogy of this poem’s reception as the first to “deconstruct” a “referential” reading
of the poem. In my opinion, if we submit Duchet’s reading of the “Dormeur” to a certain deconstructive
pressure in turn, it is possible to detect, if not a re-grounding of the text in its own language, a certain
impossibility of moving completely away from “experience” and “presence” within his discourse. Cf.,
Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres Complètes I: Poésies, Steve Murphy ed. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), p.
207.
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question therefore becomes one of accounting for the meaning that is produced by

difference, by this minimal differential inscription separating one text from another.

Duchet mentions as possible intertexts a passage from the first edition of George Sand’s

Lélia, Leconte de Lisle’s poem “La Fontaine aux lianes,” and, somewhat prudently,

Edgar Quinet’s Histoire de mes idées, all of which contain what he sees as the (rather

baroque) literary motif of the cadavre aux fleurs.87 Let us rehearse the major points of

convergence between these texts and Rimbaud’s. First, from Sand:

Sur un tapis de cresson d’un vert tendre et velouté, dormait pâle et paisible le jeune
homme aux yeux bleus (…). Les pieds de Sténio étaient enterrés dans le sable de la rive ;
sa tête reposait parmi les fleurs (…) C’était un si beau spectacle que cette nature tendre
et coquette autour d’un cadavre.88

An intertextual relationship clearly seems possible here, not only on a syntagmatic

level (i.e., cresson, fleurs/glaieuls, the dysphemism “dormir”/”reposer”), but also on a

paradigmatic, or thematic level, in the arrangement of the decomposing body surrounded

(i.e., we have the motif of the hole) by the tender, maternal, natural world. Let us now

turn to the text by Leconte de Lisle that Duchet evokes (“La fontaine aux lianes,” from

the Poèmes Barbares), which, as we shall see, contains its own hypotextual point of

reference to Sand’s Lélia:

Je vis, comme en un songe, apparaître livide

Un mort, les yeux au ciel, dans les herbes couchés !

Il ne sommeillait pas, calme comme Ophélie,

Le sourire à la bouche et les bras sur le sein ;
Ni comme Sténio, la face enseveli….89

87
Ibid., p. 376. It is curious that he doesn’t mention the famous chapter where Fabrice del Dongo joins the
Imperial Army for its déroute on the field of Waterloo. Chocheyras does make this connection in an end-
note to his study of the motif of the “noyé” in Rimbaud’s early work: “ Dans La Chartreuse de Parme (…)
Fabrice (…) trouve sur son chemin un cadavre dans un chemin d’abord ‘rempli d’eau’…”. Cf., Jacques
Chocheyras, art. cit., p. 20, n. 4.
88
Ibid., p. 375. My italics
89
Ibid. Italics mine.
 159

As Duchet underscores, we once more locate some important thematic elements in a

poem that it is not impossible to suppose that Rimbaud had read given that Leconte de

Lisle occupied such an important role within French poetry in the 1850s-60s. In de Lisle,

we find familiar topoi, such as the vertical axis running from the sky to the body (cf.,

“sous les nues”), the traditional symbolic position of the folded arms on the cadaver’s

chest, the strange smile that in fact belongs to the semiotic tradition of the rictus mortis,

the element of dream, or “songe,” and, finally, the use of rejet, or interverse enjambment

(cf., supra, line 2), as a kind of anamorphotic mode of representing a structural disruption

within language, a disorder within the order of representation itself represented by the

infinite absence of death. What separates, however, the “Dormeur” from the above-cited

(possible) inter-texts, are two crucial details: first, the marked absence of a lyrical subject

(i.e., there’s no “je” to do the seeing, no subject available to synthesize the traumatic

experience), and, second, the obvious absence of any explicit, direct denomination of

death. To the contrary, if anything, the “Dormeur” may be less about recounting or

relating in poetic form a biographical event than it may have to do with contending with

and working-through a certain kind of excessive, or traumatic, absence of authority in

modernity.

Concerning this dubious “biographism” (or biohermeneutics, perhaps), we might

recall Slavoj Žižek’s reading of the Lacanian Real, given the importance of the concept

of trauma for the argument that shall follow. For Žižek, when it comes to accounting for

the traumatic event, the point is not ultimately whether or not we see trauma as a punctual

event, or even as a kind of “dark-matter” resisting inscription into the symbolic. The

point of the real is:

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just that it produces a series of structural effects (displacements, repetitions, etc.). The
real is an entity which should be constructed afterwards so that we can account for the
distortions of the symbolic structure.90

Just such a relationship to the “Real” runs through “Le Dormeur du Val”. It is a

poem characterized by its structural mishaps, displacements, mis/indirection, silence, and

repetitions. As readers of the text, we are forced construct an ex post lectio meaning that

retrospectively (that is, only once we read the poem, fail to completely understand what

was going on, and then repeat the poem) reveals the degree to which its symbolic fabric

is saturated with attempts to speak the unspeakable, to name l’innommable. Rather than

having recourse to the auratic authority of lived experience figured in the guise of a

lyrical shifter, Rimbaud manages to suggest that even this appeal to the authority of

“presence” is unreliable, as the proper of the traumatic encounter resides in the subject’s

paradoxical not entirely being-there for the “event”. Beyond this suggestion, however,

there remains a further conclusion to be deduced from Duchet’s argument – we might

surmise that the real traumatic encounter with the “Real” of radical absence may be

taking place in literature itself, in the interstices that separate Rimbaud’s text from that of

his predecessors, and that relies upon a crucial gesture of insisting upon the radical,

existential gap separating the human from the natural world – a gap in which, as Duchet

(rightly) suggests, Nature remains luxuriantly “indifferent,” supremely cold, to the misery

and brutality of the human condition. Let us thus state that one of the most forcefully

subversive moments in the poem comes precisely with this parody of romanticism that is

the appeal to Nature to inhabit a caring, maternal role: “Nature, berce-le chaudement, il a

90
Slavoj Žižek, “The Lacanian Real: Television,” http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=38. Last accessed,
10/02/11.
 161

froid” – an appeal that has always already, Rimbaud’s poem retrospectively suggests,

broken down, fallen into the fundamental absence of interlocution that the natural world

represents. It is, rather than a deployment of a romantic trope, I think, a breakdown of this

model that accompanies the disjunction of referential poetic speech, the structural

integrity of the sonnet, and indeed the decomposition of the human form itself.

In sum, as it makes a strategic political foray into the domain of history (i.e.,

providing a critical commentary on the political situation of France at the moment of the

fall of the Second Empire), “Le Dormeur du Val” is also making a lateral cut across

literary and poetic tradition, critiquing, as it were, an overly-sentimentalized “subjective”

(Cf., the letter to Izambard of May 13, 1871) form of poetry that incessantly aims at

somehow providing a discursive recuperation of radical loss by relying on a lyrical

subject to mediate the world, or indeed on Nature as a kind of benevolent force for good

in the world and in History. What our reading of the “Dormeur” shall insist upon is the

manner in which Rimbaud inextricably links the political and the esthetic. Any critique of

the one implies a re-evaluation of the other, and to separate the two risks generating a

misreading of pacifist interpretations of “Le Dormeur,” starting with Duchet’s analysis of

the text from which the most recent readings have directly inherited the contradictory

motifs of the “Dormeur’s” peacefulness and its militancy, as well as a tendency to pass

over the text’s self-referential discordances in order to focus on the context of the Franco-

Prussian war and the fall of Second Empire.

VII. What’s so “Tranquil” about the Dormeur?

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In his reading of the sonnet, Duchet appears to ascribe to the “Dormeur” an active

political engagement in defense of the “Republic” correlative to a biographical

engagement.91 At the same time, however, he does preclude the possibility that the

poem’s tone and meaning may be more similar to the pessimistic pacifism of “Le Mal” –

a text functioning as a kind of atheistic lament over humanity’s infinite capacity for

ferocity.92

Now, even though this latter view has been challenged amongst scholars of

Rimbaud’s poetry, and nowhere more forcefully than in Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Jean-

François Laurent, and Steve Murphy’s work, I would nevertheless like to draw attention

to a curious similarity that links their analyses to Duchet’s. To wit, this continuity has to

do with the description of the “Dormeur” in critical accounts of the poem. Duchet,

comparing the text to a possible intertext in Edgar Quinet, argues that the cadaver in

Quinet’s Histoire de mes idées could not be more dissimilar to the “dormeur gracieux et

insolite que la nature doit bercer.”93 One may be taken aback by the use of the adjective

gracieux in Duchet’s commentary, for if we consider the rather distended posture of the

soldier in “Le Dormeur du Val,” “graceful” is probably the last qualifier that might leap

to mind.

As fortune might have it, most critics of the hypothèse pacifiste have a similarly

pacifistic manner of describing the figure of the soldier – one which allows them to draw

conclusions which, like Duchet’s, are in part problematized by the structural and poetic

91
I.e., participation in political clubs in Douai, attempting to get hired at the Progrès des Ardennes,
attempting to enroll in the gardes mobiles, etc. In sum, save for the rejection of pacifism, critics such as
Murphy, Laurent, and Bobillot have not strayed so far from Duchet’s reading as one might expect.
92
Claude Duchet, art. cit., pp. 372, 380. Duchet is here on truly shaky argumentative ground. In essence,
his point is that adolescents are fundamentally flighty, and, lacking any real capacity for
intellectual/ideological commitment, are only too quick to give in to cynicism. Cf., ibid., p. 372, n.3.
93
Ibid., p. 379.
 163

logic of the text. Jean-François Laurent, for example, refutes pacifistic readings of “Le

Dormeur” by arguing in essence that, if the text were indeed a denunciation of “le

scandale (…) [de] la guerre,” then we might legitimately expect the depiction of the

soldier (three stanzas out four in the sonnet, as he notes) to be a bit more gruesome, and

the body as such to not be so “tranquille”.94

In a similar vein (if with vastly more sarcasm when it comes to countervailing

readings), Jean-Pierre Bobillot has advanced the following by way of demonstrating the

poem’s militant engagement with the Republic. Arguing that the only way to read “Le

Dormeur du Val” is as a kind of cry to rally the troops, and to prepare for a battle over the

Republic, Bobillot affirms that:

… Le Dormeur du Val – loin d’être cette aimable vignette que l’on s’obstine encore, trop
souvent, à y voir – doit-il se lire comme une allégorie appelant à la reconquête
républicaine: ce ‘soldat jeune’, qui a ‘deux trous rouges au côté droit’, n’est autre qu’un
de ces ‘millions de Christs aux yeux sombres et doux’ précédemment glorifiés dans
‘Morts de Quatre-vingt-douze…’ et que, souligne Rimbaud, ‘Nous […] laissons dormir
avec la République’. Christ républicain, donc, qui ‘dort’ lui aussi, mais qui ne manquera
pas de ressusciter, et eux avec lui. Il le sait, et c’est pourquoi il peut paraître si
‘Tranquille’ dans sa mort.95

Although it is impossible on some level not to be sympathetic and indeed

convinced by such readings, which intuitively link the text to larger discursive fields and

political problems, they nevertheless contain one or two elements which call for at least

some further interrogation. Without seeking to (re)affirm that the “Dormeur” ought to be

read as an “aimable vignette” of pacifism, one cannot help but be perplexed when it

comes to the question of “resurrection” in “Le Dormeur du Val”. As we shall discuss in

our conclusion, the perspective of a Christological reading may indeed be accurate, but

94
Jean-François Laurent, art. cit., p. 21.
95
Jean-Pierre Bobillot, “Rimbaud, Thiers, Pétain et les autres,” art. cit., pp. 77-8.
 164

based on this text it is difficult to locate any prospect of redemption or resurrection in “Le

Dormeur du Val”. The same cannot be said, however, for the motifs and problematics of

sacrifice, belief, and engagement in what, for lack of a better term, passes for a lost or

impossible cause. Unless of course we are to conclude that Bobillot is setting up a

logically circular argument which proves its point only on condition of posing its

conclusion before doing so: the “Dormeur” represents the resurrection of the Republic

because Christ resurrected, which is why the “Dormeur” represents the resurrection of the

Republic, et cetera ad eternam.

One last detail stands out obtrusively, both on a hermeneutic and a structural level

– that is, the supposed “tranquility” of the figure’s pose and/or body. Both Laurent and

Bobillot reference this sememe, occurring at the opening of the sonnet’s penultimate

hemistiche, in order to support a larger argument that categorically rejects the feasibility

of a pacifistic stance towards the Franco-Prussian war.96 Yet they make a rather odd

gesture when they attribute this adjective to the very being of the soldier and not, as

would be required by combinatory logic of the syntagma to the sleeper’s chest (i.e., “sa

poitrine tranquille”). Admittedly, this syntactical unit is disrupted by the rejet that opens

the final alexandrine, but that only implies we will eventually have to account for such

structural “ruses” and show how they cohere with the text’s overall tendency to deflect

attention away from the real nature of the scene it is staging. For the moment, it suffices

to point out that the “Dormeur” is not tranquil, his chest is. We will entirely miss the

96
Curiously, however, if this poem were written prior to the fall of the Second Empire, it’s worth
reminding the reader that the truly subversive posture would have been one of resolute pacifism. We’ll
recall, for example, the passage from Vallès’s L’Insurgé in which Vingtras recounts nearly being killed by
a Parisian mob whipped into a patriotic frenzy by the declaration of war against Prussia – an episode that
was triggered by his militant pacifism which rightly saw the war as a pretext for solidifying the Empire and
setting back the cause of the République sociale a generation. Cf., Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1970), pp. 161-8.
 165

point if we do not read the adjective in rejet (“tranquille”) as both a structural and

semantic effect of dislocation that defers the moment of revelation and which cannot be

read, on a grammatical or semantic level, as an essential or even transcendental attribute

of the subject. In a much more restricted poetic sense, “tranquille” is not only rejected, it

refers and attaches only to the subject’s “poitrine” – that is, it indexes the radical

“nothingness” of absence itself; the absence of breath, of psukè, and by metonymic

extension, the irrevocable absence of the subject itself. This absence is doubled-up on a

meta-poetic level by a kind of lyrical inhumanism, by the absence of a lyrical subject, of

a poetic je. It is rather in this two-fold absence of the writing subject and the subject

written about (i.e., the poet and the dormeur) that I propose to locate a traumatic residue

of the Franco-Prussian war with which this poem is contending. It is with that in mind,

that we turn to the historical context in which “Le Dormeur du Val” was written. Critics

may be right to point out that one part of that context is the contest around the Republic,

and the siege of Paris. However, I believe that, unless we are to run the risk of

transforming “Le Dormeur du Val” into a kind of nationalistic, nineteenth-century

version of Le Chant du depart, we cannot dismiss the dramatic impact that this war had

not only on Rimbaud, but indeed on France and Europe.

VIII. Archeologies of the Dormeur: On the Historical Context

“Le Dormeur du Val’s” immediate historical context, and perhaps referent, is the

Franco-Prussian War.97 On July 15 of 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia in an

ill-fated attempt to quell political criticism of and opposition to the Second Empire

97
Cf., inter alia, Claude Duchet, art. cit. ; Steve Murphy, op. cit., pp. 187-204; Jean-Pierre Bobillot (“Le
Dormeur du Val est, sans doute, un poème de guerre. Pacifiste, si ce n’est ‘capitulard’ suivant les
interprétations usuelles”), op. cit., p. 189.
 166

through foreign military adventurism. The war lasted six weeks and would prove

disastrous for France. By the end of August, it was increasingly clear that the second

Empire was militarily and existentially doomed. Napoleon III surrendered on 2

September and the Empire was abolished two days later in favor of a Republic that then

transitioned to a Government of National Defense headed by the conservative, and

erstwhile royalist, Adolphe Thiers. The war was also a disaster in the sense that one

cannot overestimate the psychological effect of the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war.

Zola’s revealing term for the war was la débâcle, literally a drifting apart or

disintegration. As Betrand Taithe’s argues, the war was a “military defeat on an

unprecedented scale (…), reach[ing] deeper meanings than any before 1870”.98 It was, in

a word, a catastrophe that fundamentally upset, and indeed redefined, the structure of

State power as well as the sense of normalcy on both individual and national planes.

The Franco-Prussian War also led to the siege of Paris, thus arguably planting the

seeds of the Commune, a bloody civil war, and, in the late 1870s, the establishment of a

conservative Republican regime.99 The rise of this Third Republic was subsequently

grounded in a rejection of leftist politics, with its very viability in no small part due to the

chaos reigning in the ranks of conservative royalist factions who, up until the mid-to-late

1870s, won consistent – if consistently thinner and thinner – margins of victory in the

National Assembly.

Something of the importance of the events of the année terrible – as much on the

plane of the political as that of the imaginary – can be grasped by the sheer volume of

98
Bertrand Taithe, Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 2-5.
99
On the evolving and unstable political scene of the 1870s-1880s, see Jean-Pierre Azéma et Michel
Winock, La Troisième République (1870-1940) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1976), pp. 56-60. See also Charles
Sowerwine, France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 27-40.
 167

narratives that it generated. Indeed, they seemed to be at the origin of a sort of micro-

historiographical and literary genre in which I think it is important to see Rimbaud’s

poem as participating. This massive putting into text of the war totaled “over 7,000 books

(…) before 1900.”100 Indeed, following a fugue to Paris in February 1871, Rimbaud

himself comments on this synchronous proliferation of accounts of the siege of Paris by

many of the same writers who would later give damning accounts of the Commune,

giving us a sense of the importance of the event for the actors as they were living through

it: “Que chaque libraire ait son Siège, son Journal du Siège – le Siège de Sarcey en est à

sa 4eme édition”.101

Édouard Détaille, Le Transport des blessés, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal.

On the specific question of the cultural and collective traumatism that the Franco-

Prussian War represented, Taithe’s argument does indeed seem to be supported by

100
Bertrand Taithe, op. cit., 5. Accounts of the Commune, in the immediate aftermath of its repression are
even more numerous; Paul Lidsky puts the figure at 298 publications between 1871-1873 (for an average of
12 books published every month for two years), the overwhelming majority of which were virulently
hostile to the Commune. Rimbaud’s little studied communard poems should be inscribed in this micro-
literary movement. See Paul Lidsky, Les écrivains contre la Commune (Paris: La découverte, 1999), 12.
101
Arthur Rimbaud, “Lettre à Paul Demeny du 17 avril 1871,” in Poésies Complètes (Paris: Librairie
Générale Française, 1998), p. 142.
 168

iconographic representations of the war, perhaps the most emblematic of which is

Edouard Détaille’s 1883 painting, Le Transport des blesses (cf., supra).

In this tableau, whose referent is the 1870 “debacle,” the spectator is placed

before a convoy of wounded troops being displaced in the aftermath of a battle. What

draws our attention to Détaille’s painting is that it seems to represent the point of

emergence of a series of new elements of specular contemplation, techniques and

economy of subjects – all of which we might consider under the rubric of a new

semiology in the genre of the battle-scene.102 The horrific novelty of this particular mode

of representation of the war has to do with the suspended, indefinite space and time of the

subjects portrayed. Rather than bearing witness to the aftermath of a battle-scene,

organized around a “heroic” economy of soldiers dead for the Patrie, the spectator is

forced to contemplate an undefined, anodyne location and the effects of battle on the

mangled and fragmented body of the surviving subject being transported from the

battlefield post-defeat. An additional dimension to this representation that merits our

attention resides in the play between what we might call the painting’s signifier and its

signified, or, more precisely, how the former destabilizes the latter. Indeed, the logic of

the tableau is reminiscent of the semio-ideological operations taking place in what

Antoine de Baecque, looking at the Terror, has referred to as the “ceremony of

102
Maurice Samuels, for example, has convincingly argued in his Spectacular Past that the Parisian
panoramas depicting battle-scenes from wars of the First and Second Empire – notably, those consecrated
to the Crimean War which indeed attracted massive crowds under the Second Empire – were spec(ta)ular
sites of complex ambiguity at which celebration of Second Empire militarism coincided with discrete forms
of popular critique and contesting narratives of the past. It seems to us that the 1870 Franco-Prussian war –
and the re-presentations that it generated – marks the moment of a crucial symbolic rupture with this
mimetic tradition whose surface-level signification was a panegyric celebration of Napoléon I or III and the
foreign military adventures of the Empire. In Détaille’s painting, as in Zola’s prose, this element of praise
is absent altogether, replaced by a sort of mute shock before the traumatic spectacle of destruction that was
the war of 1870-7, to say nothing of the Paris Commune. See Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past:
Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
 169

wounds.”103 In sum, the ceremony of displaying the wounds of those dead for the Patrie

functions according to a pedagogical dialectic. It enunciates an existential summons, a

“sommation à être,”104 to the citizens of the Patrie who are ipso facto organized and

constituted as a body politic (and as political bodies) around the spectacle of a wound (a

trauma) to be avenged by the thus legitimated violence of the State. In this respect, Le

transport des blessés could be read – much like David’s La mort de Bara, or Weert’s

eponymous painting from the same period as Détaille’s tableau – as signifying the

esthetic point of construction and investment of power into the lives of a population via

the elaboration of an imaginary of a fragile, wounded Nation whose future citizens are

called upon to defend and avenge it.

Yet, despite the fact that Détaille’s painting shares a genealogical rapport with the

function of power revealed in de Baecque’s analysis, the spectator’s desire to construct a

meaningful narrative, such as the triumph of the Nation, or the selfless spirit of sacrifice

of its citizens for the transcendent cause of the Patrie’s survival, is frustrated. This desire

is frustrated above all by the painting’s organizational emphasis on the triad of disfigured

figures and its ceremony of the display of wounds which are both mimetic and metaphors

for the Nation at large. A triangular pattern singles out and draws the gaze to the

traumatic knots that are formed around/by the soldier with a head-wound, the soldier (to

the left) being transported on a stretcher and, at the apex, the officer whose hand appears

to have been amputated. Or, rather, this last figure is almost at the apex of Détaille’s

triangle. In point of fact, the representation of the human figure is displaced ever so

slightly in favor of the officer’s horse, symbolically suggesting that modern warfare, in

103
Antoine de Baecque, Le corps de l’histoire: métaphore et politique, 1770-1800 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy,
1993), pp. 344-374.
104
Ibid., p. 374.
 170

its infinite capacity to render the subject inhumane, has decentered the human(e) in favor

of the animal or instinctual being, in favor of the return of the repressed.105

Le Transport des blessés, detail.

One notices, finally, a very curious sort of mise en abyme with regards to the

soldier on the stretcher: he is clutching a part of the litter upon which he is being

transported. However, the handle that the soldier grips in his agony quite literally frames

the vivid red gash of his wounds. Détaille’s representation of the Franco-Prussian War

thus contains an element of self-referentiality; it points to its own status as representation.

However, because this self-reflective gesture takes place as the convoy approaches the

right (for the viewer) side of the canvas, at the spatial point of visual and narrative exit, it

is also a gesture of flight; it thus appears as a kind of hopeless semiotic attempt to signify

the presence of wounds as representative of the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War of

105
Freud offers a somewhat similar psychoanalytic interpretation of the effects of the First World War in
his Reflexions on War and Death, melancholically commenting that, “(…) investigation shows that the
deepest essence of human nature consists of instinctual impulses which are of an elementary nature (…)
Civilized society, which demands good conduct and does not trouble itself about the instinctual basis of this
conduct has thus won over to obedience a great many people who are not in this following their own nature
(…) [Man] is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his means (…) In reality, our fellow citizens have
not sunk so low (…) because they have never risen so high as we believed (…). [Thus, war allows]
individual citizens to withdraw for a while from the constant pressure of civilization and grant a temporary
satisfaction to the instincts which they have been holding in check.” Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War
and Death (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1918), pp. 21-30.
 171

1870. If the wounded soldier being transported is a visual anaphora of the painting’s title,

it stands to reason that the painting’s true subject is not just the wounded soldier, but the

wound itself.

Emile Zola takes a very different approach to his textualization of the Franco-

Prussian war. La Débâcle forms one of the last volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series

and is concerned principally with providing a narrative frame in which the defeat of

France could be rendered intelligible. The frame that Zola draws around the events of

1870-71 is arguably a biopolitical one – i.e., one that describes an etiology of the (mostly)

degenerate French race paradoxically rendered both effete and agitated by the Second

Empire, industrialization and demographic trends towards urbanization. Zola ultimately

posits the crushing of the Commune as a sort of grandiose medical gesture of blood-

letting necessary to the regeneration of the French “race.” In this and many other

respects, Zola’s putting into text of the turmoil of 1870-1871 is a catalogue of bourgeois

idées reçues perhaps not atypical of the reaction of the French literati to the upheavals of

the année terrible. Zola’s La Débâcle seamlessly melds social, political and medical

discursive configurations in order to construct a grid through which the defeat of 1870

can be apprehended. His descriptions of the war proper are not only amongst the most

stunning and disturbing pages in all of Naturalism, they also index something akin to the

traumatism we have already attempted to locate in Détaille’s tableau. Zola depicts the

aftermath of a battle in the Ardennes thusly:

Les blessures, pansées à la hâte sur le champ de bataille, quelques unes demeurées à vif,
étalaient leur détresse, entre les lambeaux des capotes et des pantalons déchirés. Des
pieds s’allongeaient, chaussés encore, broyés et saignants. Des genoux et des coudes,
comme rompus à coup de marteau, laissaient pendre des membres inertes. Il y avait des
mains cassées, des doigts qui tombaient, retenus à peine par un fil de peau (…) des flancs
saignaient par des déchirures affreuses, des nœuds d’entrailles s’étaient faits sous la peau
soulevée, des reins entamés, hachés (…) enfin, les têtes avaient souffert plus encore :
 172

mâchoires fracassées, bouillie sanglante des dents et de la langue ; orbites défoncées,

l’œil à moitié sorti ; cranes ouverts, laissant voir la cervelle.106

At the foreground of this panorama of horror is a sentiment of anxiety; anxiety for

the organic body, or indeed for a shattered subject whose contours and integrity seem to

crumble between the blank spaces separating each sememe. The semantics of the passage

are those of public torture, of a supplice (with those “broken limbs” echoing the image of

the supplice de la roue under the Ancien Régime) designed to bear down upon that

fragile and frayed strand of the skin (the fil de peau) by which the subject barely manages

to keep intact his physical and imaginary unity.107 We apprehend, furthermore, the

emergence of a leitmotif of modern warfare, the unknown soldier, whose impossible

presence simultaneously signifies the irremediable putting into question of, and the

symbolic struggle to reestablish, individual and collective identities severely fragmented

by war.

Still, there’s another figure in Zola’s La Débâcle that merits our attention; a figure

that is morphologically related to the anonymous or shattered subjectivity mimetically

reproduced in the above-passage, one that responds to the same semiotic imperatives. The

recurring figure in question is that of the “dead soldier in water” (either floating bloatedly

down the river Meuse or caught on river-brush along its banks) which appears at least

three times in the diegesis of the Débâcle.108 One can’t help but notice how particularly

Rimbaldian this figure – which is also a figurative floating signifier – of traumatism is.

It is with this in mind that we should cast a glance anew at Rimbaud’s “Dormeur,”

and attempt to establish not only its referentiality to the traumas of the Franco-Prussian

106
Emile Zola, La Débâcle (Paris: Pocket 1993), p. 322.
107
See Didier Anzieu, Le moi-peau (Paris: Dunod, 1995). My thanks to Mária Brewer for this reference.
108
Émile Zola, op. cit., pp. 400, 414-15, 427.
 173

War, but also how this textual remembering/commemoration is also informed by a logics

of political and poetic revolt that is characteristic of Rimbaud in this period. The war

indeed totally disrupted what we might call the contours of daily life in tiny Charleville-

Mézières (Rimbaud’s hometown in the Ardennes which was on the frontlines of the war).

The poet himself alludes to this irruption of the war into the fabric of daily life in his

letters to Georges Izambard and to Paul Demeny that date from period of July-August.109

The outbreak of war seemed to be unsettling, indeed obnoxious, for Rimbaud. His

professor and mentor, Izambard, was mobilized and had to depart from Charleville,

leaving Rimbaud intellectually isolated; classes for the rentrée scolaire were cancelled,

Rimbaud’s brother ran away to join the army, and his best friend (Ernest Delahaye) was

nearly killed along with his family during the bombardments of Mézières (the town

across the River Meuse from Charleville –which, being a garrison-town, was bombarded

during the opening weeks of the War).110 Indeed something of Rimbaud’s deepening

revolt vis-à-vis the state of affairs brought about by the war can be gleaned from the

properly Vallésian irony that saturates his letter to Georges Izambard dated 25 August (a

period that Duchet mentions as likely for a first draft of the “Dormeur”):

ma ville natale est supérieurement idiote entre les petites villes de province (…) parce
qu’elle voit pérégriner deux ou trois cents pioupious, cette benoîte population gesticule
(…) ma patrie se lève…moi, j’aime mieux la voir assise.111

The above quote is from a letter whose date approximately coincides with

at least a first version of “Le Dormeur du Val”. Its tone is obviously one

109
He also wryly parodies the grotesque, militaristic, “patrouillotique” fervor of the “ventres” (a
synecdoche designating the bourgeois) of Charleville in his poem “À la Musique,” a text for which Kristin
Ross has offered a reading as the site of a critique of the bourgeois class. See Kristin Ross, The Emergence
of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp.
77-83.
110
Graham Robb, Rimbaud, a Biography (W.W. Norton and Co., 2000), pp. 33-64.
111
Rimbaud, “Lettre à Georges Izambard du 25 août 1870,” op. cit., p. 63.
 174

designating a deep skepticism of imperialism and provincial patriotic chest-

thumping. It suggests that we ought to proceed with just as much skepticism when

reading this highly canonical text, the politics of which are ambivalent and,

perhaps in final analysis, too complex to be reduced to a rallying cry for the

Republic.

IX. Canons and Cannons: Is “Le Dormeur” a Founding Text of the Nation-State?

At this point, I would like to ask, “what’s in a canon?” This is an important

domain to interrogate precisely because this poem – despite what seems to me to be its

rejection of the violence unleashed by the forces of nationalism – enjoys such an

unproblematic status in the French canon of literature. Yet there is something deeply

ambivalent about the folding of Rimbaud’s work into the canon of a “national

literature”.112 This is all the more pressing an issue given the fact that, with the exception

of this poem, it is frequently the texts in verse dating from this early period of increasing

political engagement and poetic indiscipline that fall victim to what Steve Murphy once

called a sort of “selective forgetting,” which may be the ultimate logic at work in the

canon (indeed, for Murphy, the “selective forgetting” of the canon constitutes a “véritable

entreprise de neutralisation de la révolte rimbaldienne”).113 Perhaps the enterprise of

literary canonization effaces the historical and political context of Rimbaud’s verse

poems and passes over in silence the poet’s indiscipline, his radical posture of political

112
Cf., the introduction to Steve Murphy’s Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op. cit.
113
Ibid., p. 10. Fredric Jameson came to a remarkably similar conclusion considering the recuperative
dynamic of domesticating once deeply provocative and problematic texts: “…the classics of high
modernism are now part of the so-called canon and are taught in schools and universities – which at once
empties them of any of their older subversive power.” Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer
Society,” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1999), p.
19.
 175

and poetic insubordination.114 Perhaps, ultimately, canonization is the most efficient way

to forget about Rimbaud’s communard literary politics.

We might conceptualize the “canon” as a field of restricted productions and

legitimacies, akin to what Michel Foucault theorizes, in his inaugural address to the

Collège de France, as an instance of a volonté de savoir. That is, we might situate

theoretically the “canon” as a ritual by/in which power asserts itself in a certain domain,

creating and dispersing positions of truth through a play of discursive

inclusions/exclusions and by instituting an insuperable hiatus between the true and the

false.115 In the case of the canon, we have a restrictive system that creates a discipline of

culture; it attempts to elaborate a stabilized, transhistorical truth of cultural production

and authority, creating a “true” cultural discourse around the body-politic summoned to
116
constitute itself at the risk of not being dans le vrai - that is, of becoming-the-

monstrous, the Other – of the Nation. This cultural authority in turn contributes to the

grounding of the Nation-State in a natural foundation by effacing its historico-political,

discursive contingency.117 The canon, then, functions in concert with – or parallel to – a

surprising dialectic that we have already seen at work in the cérémonie des plaies.

114
On the politically subversive nature of Rimbaud’s early verse, the unsurpassed work of reference is
Murphy’s Le Premier Rimbaud, ou l’apprentissage de la subversion (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon,
1991).
115
Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archeology of Knowledge (New York:
Pantheon, 1972), pp. 217-219.
116
Ibid., 224.
117
Or, for that matter, the obscene violence of its origins: in the case of the modern canon, this would be
the long struggle over the revolutionary legacy of 1789 throughout the nineteenth century, and the brutal
repression (in the political and psychoanalytic senses of the term) of the Republic’s founding “crime”: the
semaine sanglante. As Walter Benjamin put it, there is no cultural treasure that is not also an artifact of
barbarity. For Benjamin, history is not a progressive, linear chronological movement from the past to the
present; rather like the Freudian model of the mind, it is characterized by temporal folds and overlapping,
such that the past exists within a present and barbarity side by side with “culture”. Walter Benjamin,
“Theses on History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schoken, 1969), p. 256.
 176

One possible theorization of how the “canon” operates as a distinct linguistico-

cultural apparatus within the economy of power/knowledge is that the “canon” sign-posts

certain works, certain uses of language as sharing an appurtenance with that ethereally

eternal category of bon usage. As Foucault would put it, the text that comes to be deeply

aligned with a particular identity (e.g., that of a nation-state) has been inserted into a

series of discursive, esthetic, and political practices and partages that aim at

immobilizing an otherwise dynamic play of (access to) discourse.118 When we begin to

inspect the canon we catch a glimpse of one of its disavowed yet imperative functions:

the canon creates narratives and knowledges of the past; but it also pushes other

(counter)narratives and epistemes out to the grey zone and silent hummings of its

indeterminate margins. In sum, if the “canon” is not entirely commensurate with

ideology, it cannot be denied that the “canon” plays a role as a relay, or apparatus, of

ideology – a contingent practice governed by rules that seek to give its functioning the

appearance of transhistorical immutability and legitimacy. Like the “school,” the canon is

“mandaté pour sanctionner (…) les produits hérétiques et pour inculquer la norme

explicite qui contrecarre les effets des lois d’évolution; [il] consacr[e] l’usage dominant

comme seul légitime, par le seul fait de l’inculquer.”119

How, therefore, might this folding into the canon be at odds with the critically

subversive poetics of Rimbaud’s poem which, precisely, seem to be working to

complicate just such a nationalist project ? For in their re-readings of “Le Dormeur du

Val,” several recent critics have positioned the poem in a provocative light that generates

as many questions as it settles, essentially arguing that “Le Dormeur” is a radically

118
Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” op .cit. pp. 217-9.
119
Pierre Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Paris : Seuil, 2001), p.91.
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republican poem whose central figure is a Christic one signifying the promise of a mystic

regeneration of the subject in the poetic space.120

Steve Murphy’s analysis of “Le Dormeur du Val” in his Rimbaud et la ménagerie

impériale constitutes the point of origin of a republican re-inscription of the text that

refutes a previous scholarly interpretation pointing towards a rejection of warfare. His

reading is founded, inter alia, on the poem’s date, as well as on a letter that Rimbaud sent

to the mayor of Douai requesting rifles for the local National Guard. Given this

supporting circumstantial evidence pointing towards identification with republican

politics and opposition to the Empire, Murphy argues that it is possible to locate in the

“soleil” of the poem’s third line a traditionally revolutionary allegory – namely, the

representation of the Republic as a solar force dispelling the obscurantism of the Ancien

Régime and the counter-Revolution.121

This revolutionary filigree allows Murphy to advance a reading of the “montagne

fière” as an onomastic metaphor for the Montagne section of the Revolutionary

Convention (the soleil is the grammatical complement of the montagne in the text).122

Ultimately, these semio-political elements lead him to argue – in a reading that has

become standard since – that the poem is the furthest thing possible from a pacifist text.

To the contrary, it represents a texte engagé militantly (i.e., glaïeuls are etymologically

“little swords”) for the defense of a Republic metonymically contained in the figure of

120
Jean-François Laurent, “Le Dormeur du val, ou la chair meurtrie qui se fait verbe poétique,” in,
Rimbaud à la loupe : Actes de colloque, 2 (Charleville : Musée-Bibliothèque Rimbaud, 1990), pp. 21-27.
Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Le Meurtre d’Orphée, op. cit.; Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op.
cit.
121
Murphy elaborates on this solar topos in a recent work, writing that “[l]e soleil est l’image par
excellence chez Rimbaud de la liberté et des Lumières de la République Sociale.”Steve Murphy, Rimbaud
et la Commune: microlectures et perspectives (Paris : Garnier-Classiques, 2009), p. 112. My emphasis.
122
Ibid.; cf. also, Murphy, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op. cit., pp. 179-204.
 178

the soldat mort pour la patrie whose sacrifice may indeed lead to the Republic’s

resurrection.123

Murphy is of course quite right to pick up on this solar motif in nineteenth-

century revolutionary discourse. (Sun) light qua allegory of human reason, of logos, is in

fact one the fundamental metaphors of western philosophy, going back to Plato’s allegory

of the cave, that is, one of the West’s first moments of critique of ideology as a

phenomenon taking place between description and cognition (i.e., in the most elementary

sense, what it is we can [legitimately] say, know, feel, and believe about one’s self,

others, their relations in the world, etc.), structuring a subject’s “imaginary relations” to

the way s/he imagines her/his material, or “real conditions of existence.”124

Allegory of Truth, Revolutionary Period, Musée Carnavalet.

Such solar allegories, inherited via Les Lumières, from Plato were rife during the

time of the French Revolution125 as a kind of esthetic short-hand for designating and

rendering intelligible any number of political binaries opposing the revolution to the

123
Ibid., p. 195. Jean-François Laurent, art. cit., p. 23. Yet if the gladiolas are indeed the small swords used
by the Roman army (but which one? the Roman Republic, or the Roman Empire, the discursive economy
of which was explicitly deployed by Napoléon III for propagandistic purposes), can we not also hear in this
etymon the slightly more sinister resonance with gladiators: i.e., men who killed one another for the
amusement of the Emperor?
124
Plato, The Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974), pp. 169-71. See also, Louis Althusser, “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: New
Press Review, 1971), p. 162.
125
See, Antoine de Baecque, La Caricature révolutionnaire (Paris : Presses du C.N.R.S., 1988).
 179

counter-revolution (or to European monarchies, or to the church); opposing (the Truth of)

reason to (the ideological mystifications of) ignorance; contrasting Republican virtue and

rights with the nightmarish geopolitical landscape of oppression throughout Europe and

indeed the world; opposing, finally, the French language to the patois of France,126 and

indeed the rational mind of the (male) citizen to the night of the world of superstition

amongst peasants, women, children, etc.

127
Moloch, Allégorie de la franc-maçonnerie et de la Commune, 1871.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this soleil républicain is not only

an invariable element in the structure of republican discourse, as much on the

iconographic level as in journalistic prose, political discourse, and poetry (the solar

isotopia is recurrent, for example, in Hugo’s most politically infused poetic texts from

Les Châtiments), it is increasingly a metaphor deployed in revolutionary socialist

126
See in particular Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel’s fascinating analysis of Abbot
Grégoire’s inquiry into the (potentially fatal) linguistic division of France at the time of the revolution’s
turn to Terror, Une Politique de la Langue, la Révolution française et les patois: l’enquête de Grégoire
(Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
127
http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/siege/caricatures.html. Accessed, 02/20/2011. Priscilla Ferguson
reminds us that Hugo explicitly reactivates this solar imaginary in his historical novel, Quatre-vingt-treize,
itself of course a displaced inscription of the events of the Commune: “To understand the Vendée, one must
imagine this antagonism: on the one side, the French Revolution, and on the other, the Breton
peasant…Can this blindman accept this light?” Victor Hugo, Quatre-vingt-treize, cited in Priscilla P.
Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1994), p. 164.
 180

discourse. In one striking and indeed poignant caricature entiled Les Spectres, a powerful

ray light standing in metonymically for the solar-revolutionary metaphor shines across a

field of graves representing various nineteenth-century massacres of leftist oppositional

figures (e.g., the grave being opened in the foreground on the left is that of the victims of

the Transnoniain Street massacre, which occurred early in the July Monarchy). The

reading is clear: at some point, following a grand soir to-come, the light of Revolution

will raise the ghosts of the Commune, and indeed every other defeated Revolutionary

movement or moment, perhaps retrospectively

vindicating these crushing defeats in an ultimate

victory over injustice.128

129
Moloch, Les Spectres, 1871.

Anon., Le Travail, c’est la liberté, circa 1870-71.

Adrian Rifkin, for example, devotes a prescient

commentary to the solar motif in revolutionary discourse and iconography from the

128
The caption of this caricature reads, “To his excellence Mr. Thiers, Executive of the Rural Republic”.
129
“Les spectres,” http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/siege/images/par00736.jpg. Accessed, 02/20/2011.
 181

period of the late Second Empire to the Commune in order to argue against the prevailing

historiographical view of the time that such images had “no particular (historical,

ideological, rhetorical, etc.) thing to mean”.130 For Rifkin, on the contrary, they indicate

that the Communards positioned their own revolutionary discourse and movement in

affiliation with the Jacobins of 1792-3, noting that by the late winter of 1871, “the images

of light and dark, sunrise and sudden illumination [are] very typical” of radical

newspapers. They thus constitute part of a revolutionary rhetoric “overlap[ping] with

longer standing vocabularies, whether religious or political, and one important aspect of

its history is the appropriation of the sun for a republican as opposed to a royalist

discourse.”131

Although Murphy’s invocation of the Terreur of the French Revolution is both

hermeneutically rich and innovative, it raises a number of problematic questions. One

such question has to do with determining whether or not “Le Dormeur du Val” is simply

one of the foundational texts/myths of the political/literary imaginary of the Third

Republic, in which case the poem’s canonization is more coherent than ideologically

suspect.132 The signifier at the heart of that political imaginary is incidentally a dead

soldier, one killed by a Prussian, one whose body is appropriated and politically

localized, whose wounds are displayed, re-membered, and avenged by the Patrie. This

metaphoric body-politic is invested by a nationalistic discourse that both serves to

position the cadaver of the dead soldier in a field of compulsory political and subjective

130
“Le travail, c’est la liberté,” circa 1870-1, in Adrian Rifkin, “No Particular Thing to Mean,” in Block 8
(1983), p. 39. We should emphasize the “particular” in Rifkin’s title. The sun in question isn’t generally the
signifier of the Republic, but more and more specifically the emblem of revolution and the République
sociale.
131
Ibid., p. 42.
132
Murphy himself would likely reject such a reading, but it remains a kind of uninterrogated consequence
of his analysis.
 182

identifications and, in a circular sense, becomes a discourse of power that postulates the

Nation-State as the locus of legitimate, monopolized, organized violence.133 De Baecque

theorizes that one can indeed locate instances of this phenomenon in the period of

revolutionary Terror, and we might turn to Jacques-Louis David’s three martyr portraits

Marat Assassiné, Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau and, especially, La Mort de Bara for

evidence of just such a mechanism of power.134

Read thusly “Le Dormeur du Val” could function as a vector of baroque

propaganda, a pedagogical republican ceremony reminiscent of the Terror in which the

“imaginary community” (Republican or otherwise) is constructed and united135 around

the twin figures of the sublime, mortally wounded soldier and the Patrie vengeresse –

ironically, the same whose cannons created the cadaver – always posed to exercise more

violence in the name of the subjects it represents. As Antoine de Baecque has argued:

la communauté (…) se regroupe autour du corps, trouve en lui cohésion et certitude,

célèbre la gloire de son spectacle funéraire avant de métamorphoser cette cohésion en une
haine de l’Autre (…) la cérémonie des plaies est une métamorphose de la compassion
pour une meurtrissure en haine pour un corps étranger.136

For all its very close attention to detail in the imagery of the poem, built into a

certain uninterrogated republican reading of “Le Dormeur du Val” is a complex

marginalization of several poetic operations taking place on the level of the poem as

such, and which complicate conclusions that shut down the poem to further

interpretation. Let us take the example of the “montagne”. In one particular poem in the

Rimbaldian corpus, the “montagne” is also associated with the site of (a) loss: indeed,

133
Antoine De Baecque, op. cit., p. 370.
134
Bara has a rapport that is more than tangential; he too appears to be more sleepy than deceased and
shares in his iconological nudity a lexical, semantic and political rapport with Rimbaud’s dormeur. Bara,
incidentally, enjoys a really rather intense pedagogical and iconological dissemination in the 1880s,
precisely when the Third Republic becomes a viable political institution.
135
And metaphorically, then, it has a certain kinship with the canon.
136
Antoine de Baecque, op. cit., p. 350.
 183

“Mémoire” could be understood as the poetic transcription of a scene of paternal

abandonment during which the integrity of the child’s universe is profoundly

disturbed.137 Rather than looking to the Convention – or perhaps before we look to the

Convention, for I have nothing against a neo-Jacobin reading of “Le Dormeur du Val”

which would be supremely coherent in the fraught political context of late 1870 – we

might infra-textually see in this image the index of an encounter with traumatic absence

and radical silence that seeps into language itself.

Why, for instance, does “Le Dormeur du Val” insist on a rhetorical economy of

understatement and, indeed, the repression of the key signifier/rhyme that haunts the

sonnet, mort?

While Laurent and Bobillot138 insist that the suppression of finitude in “Le

Dormeur” ultimately points to a poetic resurrection of the soldier in the rebirth of the

Republic, I would like to consider such suppression as a kind of limit point in language

suggesting a radical rejection of the spectacle of warfare. Let us consider, with Jean

Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, repression taken in its Freudian acceptation: “[t]he

essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance

137
“Hélas, Lui, comme/ mille anges blancs qui se séparent sur la route/ s’éloigne par delà la montagne !
Elle, toute/froide, et noire, court ! après le départ de l’homme. ” Note the anaphoric occurrence of the
homonyms “ Lui (pronom)/Luit (verbe) ” which reappears in the fourth line of the Dormeur. Murphy
indeed signals the proximity between the two poems: “On est tout près des paysages symboliques de Soleil
et Chair et Mémoire”. Murphy, op. cit., p. 200. Our remarks, of course, are purely speculative, and it is
indeed questionable as to whether or not it even makes sense to close down the dissemination around the
signifier “Lui” in this text by attributing to it a paternal referent (even if on a mytho-structural level, this
remains possible, as the psychotic Dr. Schreber’s case reminds us). In any event, as Seth Whidden has
perspicuously underscored, the central problematic in this text is the relationship (reflections, movements
toward and away from, etc.) between masculine solarity (with its mythical and political resonances) and
feminine liquidity. See Whidden’s reading of “Mémoire” as a phenomenologico-poetic disruption within
the temporal organization and spatial location of the lyrical subject in his Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric
Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud (Amsterdam and New York: Faux Titre, 2007), pp. 168-79. See also,
Michael Riffaterre, “Sylleptic Symbols: Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire’,” Nineteenth-Century French Poetry:
Introduction to Close Reading, Christopher Prendergast, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), pp. 178-199.
138
Jean-François Laurent, art. cit. ; Jean-Pierre Bobillot, op. cit.
 184

from the [textual] conscious.”139 Repression crucially takes place in the “Dormeur” on the

level of what we might call the signifier as such; it is first and foremost aimed at

‘representatives’ which are deployed in order to deny entry of the traumatic event into the

level of conscious poetic expression. Let us be clear, then: the force of Rimbaud’s poem

resides precisely in the fact that he manages to express the anxiety of encountering death

better than a Lamartine or a de Lisle because he refuses to express it explicitly at all.

Rimbaud’s text (not Rimbaud himself) illustrates, furthermore, a cortical psychoanalytic

phenomenon occurring during repression: as is well known, repression guarantees ipso

facto a compulsive, if displaced along a chain of signifiers, insistence on the thought or

desire that is repressed into the unconscious. It guarantees in other words the return of the

repressed.

And it is precisely such a tense operation that one attends to in the “Dormeur du

Val,” with the “Thing” literally turned away (if we remember the etymology of verse as a

“turn”), and turned-around through the turns of language and rhetorical loops through

which the poem sends us in order to draw our attention to the element that is being denied

entry into the textual conscious, but upon which its language nevertheless fixates with

irresistible insistence. Still, this “traumatic” disclosure only emerges as a kind of after-

effect of the text’s final failure to disclose its meaning at all, its final persistent

metonymical periphrasis (i.e., the vivid trous rouges) that figures as one final instance of

repetition at the most basic, material level of language itself (i.e., in the phonemes ru/ru).

In his important essay on the uncanny (in many respects, a crucial precursor to Beyond

the Pleasure Principle), Freud notes that amongst the various phenomena that

139
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York : W.W. Norton
and Co., 1973), s.v. “Repression,” pp. 392-3.
 185

characterize an encounter with the uncanny (unheimlichkeit), the most fundamental are

that of, first doubles, and second, repetition. The former is the unbearable reminder of the

subject’s mortality, and the latter is the obstinate return of some obscure object perceived

as significant. What sets the uncanny apart from other, “run-of-the-mill” experiences of

anxiety is its relationship to the mechanism of repression (note, for example, in Freud’s

lexicological study of unheimlich, the recurrence of the trope of periphrasis)140 and thus

to the inevitable return of the repressed: “[L]à est quelque chose de refoulé qui fait retour.

Cette espèce de l’angoissant serait justement l’étrangement inquiétant.”141

Given, on the one hand, the semantic content of the poem (i.e., an encounter

with a cadaver), and on the other the rhetorical tension between what we might conceive

as the repression of this content and its return on a structural level, perhaps we might do

well to re-evaluate the “Dormeur” in the light of certain psychoanalytic concepts such as

trauma, repetition, and repression. In a Freudian light, we might just see the text

rendering Nature, the homeland (the heimisch), and indeed all that is “familiar” in lyrical

poetry decidedly suspect, uncanny, unheimlich. Let us turn, at present, then, to a rehearsal

of the debates and conceptual stakes surrounding the question of “trauma”.

X. A (Very Brief) Genealogy of Trauma as a Psychoanalytic Problem

The question of repetition, particularly of unpleasant experiences, is at the heart of

the Freudian discovery of the death-drive. Just as important from an archeological

140
“Nous avons d’ailleurs vu que nombre de langues modernes ne peuvent pas du tout rendre notre
expression : une maison unheimlich autrement que par la formule, ‘ein Haus, in dem es spukt’.” Sigmund
Freud, “L’Inquiétante étrangeté,” in L’Inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais, B. Féron, trans. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1985), p. 246. See also, pp. 217-223.
141
Ibid., p. 246.
 186

perspective is the fact that this crucial epistemic transformation within Freud’s

metapsychological corpus having to do with repetitions of distressing ideas, habits,

dreams, etc., occurs roughly during and in the immediate aftermath of World War I.142

We ought to keep in mind the extent to which, when it came to theorizing the (death)

drive(s), repetition is at the murky center of the problem for Freud, and so too is the

massive question of historical violence. This is true as much for the period in which

Freud composed Beyond the Pleasure Principle as it was, tragically, at the end of his life

when, forced to flee Nazi persecution of Jews in Vienna, he wrote that masterpiece of the

“return of the repressed,” Moses and Monotheism.143

It was in the decade or so after the Franco-Prussian war that Charcot began his

proto-psychoanalytic studies on hysteria at the Salpêtrière, and indeed it suffices to take

but a glance at Maupassant, for example, to get something of an impression of the

importance that phenomena such as séances d’hypnotisme were assuming in the cultural

imaginary.144 Indeed, the question of hypnotism itself may be read retrospectively as

representing a radical and disquieting shift, a decentering, within the subject’s

142
In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay points out, however, that the problem of accounting for repetition
is one that Freud grapples as early as his collaboration with Breuer on hysteria. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for
Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), pp. 55-87.
143
Cathy Caruth, “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals,” in Assemblage 20 (April, 1993), p. 24. See
also Peter Gay, op. cit., pp. 361-417. Caruth quite explicitly – and eloquently – conceives of Freud’s
writings on trauma as historically located acts attempting to account for their own situation of enunciation,
and indeed as a kind of struggle, at the end of his life at least, to come to terms with the traumatic, if
“freeing,” loss of one’s country, friends, colleagues, language, culture, and indeed one’s past, if not future
(Freud was 82 in 1938). See, “Prefatory notes,” in Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp.
66-71. Caruth states that “in Freud’s own theoretical explanation of trauma, in the example of the accident
[i.e., the train accident from Beyond the Pleasure Principle], it is, finally, the act of leaving which
constitutes [trauma’s]central and enigmatic core (…) The trauma of the accident, its very unconsciousness,
is borne by an act of departure.” Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of
History,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991), pp. 189-90.
144
I have particularly in mind the sort of pre-Freudian short-story on madness that almost seems to
anticipate Daniel Paul Schreber, “Le Horla”. Indeed these two texts really ought to be read together, as the
sheer uncanniness of their similarities is deeply supportive of the Freudo-Lacanian thesis that the problem
of the relation of a subject to its unconscious is one of signs between shifted around on combinatory and
substitutive axes.
 187

relationship to itself – a shift that is in fact a fundamental displacement in which the

subject falls prey to instances of parapraxis such as the radical forgetting of repression

and carrying out actions without entirely knowing why (which is, after all, about as close

to a definition of the unconscious formation of the symptom as one gets before Freud

himself). It is even possible– though the question merits further study – that the

upheavals of the early 1870s helped produce a paradigmatic shift within the discourse of

psychiatry creating the epistemological conditions of possibility for the emergence of a

discourse like psychoanalysis. Thanks to genealogical studies of psychiatry as a

nineteenth-century discursive practice, we know that one of the ways in which psychiatry

managed to go “mainstream” consisted precisely in producing an account of the Paris

Commune from the standpoint of psychological deviance.145 Decades later, as Ruth Leys

points out, many of Freud’s major metapsychological theorizations and concepts, such as

the defense mechanisms, the death-drive and the repetition compulsion, are elaborated in

response to and in the context of the traumatisms of the First World War. In Leys’s view,

this conflict had an important contextual role in “considerably enhanc[ing]” the

epistemological, if not medical, currency of psychoanalysis and its methods.146

Laplanche and Pontalis remind us that the repetition compulsion emerged like

something of a traumatic element within Freud’s own thinking about the science of the

subject that he was attempting to consolidate, forcing him to re-work, re-think, and repeat

the foundational moment of psychoanalytical theory. There was to be a crucial difference

in this repetition, one which would push his discourse beyond the fabled pleasure

145
Ian Dowbiggin, “Degeneration and hereditarianism in French mental medicine 1840-90: psychiatric
theory as ideological adaptation,” in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. I,
People and Ideas, W.F. Bynum et al., eds. (London and New York: Tavistock, 1985), pp. 189-232. See also
Catherine Glazer’s “De la Commune comme maladie mentale,” Romantisme 48 (1985), pp. 63-70.
146
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 21-24
 188

principle, if not call it provisionally into question: why, for example, did certain subjects

prove to have an uncanny capacity, despite themselves, to repeat unpleasurable

experiences? Phenomena such as aggression, hatred, self-destruction, and sado-

masochism had always, as Laplanche argues, been on Freud’s epistemological horizon as

so many blips indicating a dimension of the human psyche that could not fully be folded

into the quantitative economy of the pleasure principle. Prior even to the 1915 “Instincts

and their Vicissitudes,” Freud had been theoretically aware of something which we may

compare to “dark matter,” something undetectable except in its effects, indemonstrable,

and yet a priori necessary in order for a speculative psychoanalytical theory to work

“properly”:

“[w]ithin Freud’s thought and, more generally, within psychoanalytical practice as it

developed before 1920 or even before 1915, it would be easy to make a list of those
numerous places or moments in which ‘aggressive manifestations’ may be observed: the
oedipal complex (…); love-hate ambivalence (…); negative transference, resistance (…);
sadomasochistic perversion; sadistic aspects of pregenital stages, etc.”147

If a dream is fundamentally, as the Interpretation of Dreams put it some 20 years

earlier, a hallucinatory attempt to satisfy an (un/conscious) desire or wish, why would

former soldiers dream, for example, about those excessively unpleasurable moments

when their lives were in mortal danger, when their comrades were killed, etc.? As Freud

himself states, he stumbled upon a kind of irresistible force threatening to rip

psychoanalysis apart at the theoretical seams: “If we take into consideration the whole

picture made up of [masochistic tendencies and irrational feelings of guilt in] neurotics,

147
Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), p. 85.
 189

we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively

governed by the desire for pleasure.”148

As Laplanche and Pontalis suggest, the death-drive, in essence, is fundamental to

the Freudian discovery to the extent that the concept is not only necessary for

understanding psychological trauma, but in the end becomes the very figure by which the

repetitive nature of drives as such is to be understood.149 Crucially, this discovery was, if

not made, at the very least articulated by Freud in the aftermath of that large-scale

slaughter that was the “Great War”. In other words, the discourse of psychoanalysis, the

modes of thinking and indeed the lexicon that we inherit from Freud and deploy in order

to describe and attempt to work-through trauma are intimately bound to modern warfare.

XI. Repetitions

Let us ask the following: what kinds of phenomena, in the broadest acceptation,

may be said to characterize the disorienting, disarticulating experience, the “hole [ripped]

in existence” of the “traumatic”?150 First and foremost, the question of repetition comes

to mind. Indeed, Ruth Leys speculates that if we think about trauma in terms of

evenementiality, the “event” of trauma is at base the unleashing of the death-drive as

such, to such a degree that she, glossing on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,

claims that the repetition compulsion is in fact a manifestation of the death-drive.151 For

Laplanche and Pontalis, the death-drive is the very figure by which repetition becomes

theorized within the discourse of psychoanalysis: “rather than any particular type of

148
Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), p. 243. See also, J. Laplanche and J.B.
Pontalis, op. cit., s.v., “Death Instinct” and “Compulsion to Repeat”.
149
J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, op. cit., pp. 98-101.
150
Dominick LaCapra, op. cit., p. 41.
151
Ruth Leys, op. cit., p. 24.
 190

instinct (…), it is rather that factor which determines the actual principle of all instinct

(...).[It is] the very essence of the unconscious in its indestructible and unrealistic

aspect.”152 Further, as noted above, Freud identifies repetition amongst the most salient

aspects of the uncanny, along with doubleness, and it is indeed in his essay on the

uncanny that the founder of psychoanalysis first truly begins to forge a conceptual path

towards the death-drive; that is, it is here that Freud first lays out in a non-technical paper

his concept of the repetition compulsion. Indeed, in certain conditions not only is “[l]e

facteur de repetition (…) source d’inquiétante étrangeté,” but more crucially:

…dans l’inconscient psychique (…) on parvient à discerner la domination d’une

compulsion de répétition (…) qui est assez forte pour se placer au-delà du principe de
plaisir (…), qui se manifeste encore très nettement dans les tendances du petit enfant et
domine une partie du déroulement de la psychanalyse du névrosé.153

Slavoj Žižek, perhaps the most important intellectual figure to explicitly theorize

the question of the death-drive in conjunction with politics, history, and resistance, has

advanced a definition that resonates profoundly with the Lacanian iteration of this

concept put forth by Laplanche and Pontalis. For Žižek, the death-drive is nothing other

than a kind of uncanny excess of life that is caught in an im-mortal series of repetitions

for their own sake so that paradoxically the death-drive is in fact life at the degree zero,

or a kind of excessive inhumanity inscribed as a hole in the heart of the human.154

152
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, op. cit., p. 102. Lacan, with whom both Ponatlis and
Laplanche studied and whose theorization of the death drive can indeed be heard in Laplanche and
Pontalis’s definition, describes (death) drive(s) as the fundamental tendency to produce repetition within
the mute functioning of the symbolic order. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, II: The Ego in
Freud’s Theory and in the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) pp. 24,
326 inter alia. Dylan Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis” (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996), p. 33.
153
Sigmund Freud, op. cit., pp. 239, 242. My italics.
154
Coincidentally, one of the metaphors which serve to elucidate this concept as it relates to a kind of
unbearable source of enjoyment, or the Real, for Žižek is that of a terrifying wound which seems imbued
with a paradoxical vitality. On this note, he refers to Kafka’s short story A Country Doctor, and to the
pulsating gash (i.e., trauma) in vivid red and white stuck in Irma’s throat, gazing back at the doctor as he
peers down the gaping hole of her mouth from the beginning of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Slavoj
 191

Repetition, the unleashing or unbinding of the death-drive, then, is a kind of effect

of trauma, theoretically posited as an ex post facto attempt by the psyche to master the

brutally unexpected intrusion of traumatic excess for which it was unprepared at the

moment of the “event”. Consequently, trauma is tied to a sort of temporal disruption for

the subject. That is, the essential temporal category of “trauma” is Nachträglichkeit, or,

the après-coup of delayed temporality, of deferred comprehension, of the disjunction

between event or situation and its representation (its inscription into a symbolic

framework permitting the subject to understand, or theorize it).155

Indeed, there’s an interruption between percept, and its transformation into a

meaningful representation for the subject. The gap, or discrepancy, between T0 and T1 in

which trauma is produced and the short circuit of the repetition compulsion is effectuated

is due, then, not only to a lack of anticipation, of preparedness, but also as an effect of the

subject’s (active, if unconscious) re-working, retranscription of the event into a phantasy,

symptom, or text that can be deciphered. As Cathy Caruth has argued, trauma and the

repetition compulsion are fundamentally linked to questions of anxiety and the

(im)possibility of directly accessing memories, lived experience, and indeed history – of

not being prepared for the anxiety of history, of one’s own history, of retroactively trying

to prepare to experience it, of waking-up into life upon experiencing the possibility of

death too intensely in a nightmare. As Caruth eloquently summarizes, in a passage that

Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 76. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of
Dreams, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1913), pp. 91-94.
155
This is precisely the case of the “Wolf-Man,” who, according to Freud, witnessed at the age of
approximately one and half his parents engaged in an act of coitus a tergo, but only retroactively was able
to append to this “primal scene” a meaning at the age of four when, endowed with an “infantile theory of
sexuality,” he witnesses dogs copulating. C.f., Laplanche and Pontalis, op. cit., s.v., “Deferred Action,” p.
113. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis [The ‘Wolfman’],” in The Wolfman and
Other Cases (London and New York: Penguin, 2003). Cf, especially the subsection, “Recapitulation and
Problems,” pp. 303-24
 192

resonates uncannily with the excipit of Rimbaud’s poem, “the trauma of the nightmare

does not simply consist in the experience within the dream [or poem, for that matter], but

in the experience of waking up from it (…); trauma consists not only in having confronted

death, but in having [confronted it], precisely, without knowing it.”156

XII. Absence, or:

Why You Don’t Have to Stumble Upon a Dead Body to Write a Sonnet about One

When it comes to reading “Le Dormeur du Val” (or any text, for that matter) in

the oblique light of psychoanalytic theories of how the subject deals with the prospect of

its own destitution, we are faced with a couple of well known dilemmas. Namely, how do

we avoid psychoanalyzing the author and abusing the discursive concepts of

psychoanalysis? If we wish to avoid falling into the trap of biographical reductionism or

over-determinism, we shall have to take into account in our reading of the intersections of

history and trauma in “Le Dormeur du Val” an important problematic identified by

Dominick LaCapra. Simply stated, LaCapra argues that a traumatic event, a loss, is not

the same thing as a traumatic absence. There is an important distinction between

“absence” qua the loss of transcendental narratives and origins, and a specific traumatic

“loss” qua event localizable in history and that can in principle be addressed, accounted

for, grieved, and redressed to some degree by a collective, political process.157 For

LaCapra, the true danger lies in “structuralizing” specific traumatic events; it resides in

passing from an event which has a genealogy that must be narrativized and apprehended

156
Cathy Caruth, “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals,” Assemblage 20 (April, 1993), p. 25.
157
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001), pp. 149-51
 193

to the extent possible, to a kind of universal melancholy without telos, with no (political,

juridical, theoretical, etc.) solution:

The difference (or non-identity) between absence and loss is often elided, and the two are
conflated with confusing and dubious results (…). [I]t threatens to convert subsequent
accounts into displacements of the story of original sin wherein a prelapsarian state of
unity or identity – whether real or fictive – is understood as giving way to a fall to
difference and conflict. (…) In an obvious and restricted sense, losses may entail absence,
but the converse need not be the case.158

Drawing such a distinction has profound consequences for the types of divergent

interpretations that the “Dormeur” can produce. For instance, if we take the text as a kind

referential mode of writing poetry about war as a traumatic event, the following question

inevitably arises: does the poem represent an attempt to domesticate “the Thing by

reducing it to its symbolic status, by providing it with a [subjective] meaning,”159 or does

it represent a more ambiguous attempt to cope with absence, with radical finitude?

I would argue that this approach is misguided for a number of salient reasons, not

least of which being that such attempts at “domesticating” the Historical trauma of 1870-

71 led to a number of intersecting, and rather ugly, cultural and discursive formations

such as racism, classism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and militarism that sought to

“evenementialize” the structural absence which is a (pre)condition of “modernity”. These

discourses competed to embody the disaster of the war and the Commune in a specific

entity posing a mortal threat to the biopolitical survival of the Nation. Such a rhetoric is, I

think, demonstrably at the antipodes of Rimbaud’s proto-communard politics in 1870; if

158
Ibid., “Reflections on Trauma, Absence, and Loss,” in Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in
Contemporary Culture, Peter Brooks and Alex Woodrich, eds. (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2000), pp. 178-201.
159
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 71.
 194

the dead soldier, who could be Prussian just as well as French,160 is the victim of

anything, it is not of a foreign (or internal) enemy posing a threat to the “territory,” but of

a structural social, political and economic contradiction in European society at the end of

the nineteenth century.161

These preliminary caveats are, I believe, necessary to pose, as the specificity of

absence that LaCapra articulates is not only pertinent for thinking through the complexity

the traumatic and its symbolic inscription, but also for examining what we might consider

the political aspect of absence in a structural sense as it relates to democracy. Following

the well known Lefortian axiom of the absent site/seat of power in democracy,162 as well

as Rancière’s theorization of democracy as the form of politics whose arkhè is

constitutively absent, I claim what Rimbaud points towards in “Le Dormeur du Val” is

precisely the refusal to convert absence into loss or lack. Rimbaud pointedly refuses to

designate an “enemy” disturbing the peaceful relations of French society. Rather, he

seems to imply that conflict and antagonism are deeply embedded in the structure of

society itself, and become particularly visible when the poor are sent to die in wars

capriciously started so that a change does not occur within society, politics, or socio-

political relations. Fundamentally, then, we have a kind of writing of the limit, or of

160
Laurent alludes to the “universality” of the dead soldier in his study of the “Dormeur” without however
fully following the implications of this detail: “Ce ‘soldat’, sans autre précision, est là, étrangement seul,
hors de toute armée, de tout pays, de tout moment caractérisé.” Jean-François Laurent, art. cit., p. 21.
161
E.g., the well known tension eloquently expatiated upon by Lenin during the First World War between
archaic political forms such as monarchies and empires, and the revolutionary dynamic of industrial and
finance capital. Let us not forget that the Franco-Prussian war is a kind of prodrome to the near-conflicts
amongst European capitalist over resources, markets, and territory in Africa in the 1890s, nowhere better
entified than by the Fashoda conflict, and which would eventually explode in 1914. See Vladimir Lenin,
“Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1963), pp. 667-766.
162
Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique: XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
 195

excess in this poem – an excess of History, of representational strategies, of human

violence, of the horrifying encounter with finitude as universal human condition.

If we miss this refusal to convert absence into presence, to dialecticalize the

encounter with the violence of History, we run the risk of passing-by the logic of the text,

which is also the fundamental problem or question of democracy, namely, how do we

arrive at a “being-in-common without common-being”?163 If we are not attentive to the

ambivalent silences of “Le Dormeur du Val,” we also run the slightly more considerable

risk of negating the radical “absence” inherent in the two principal topics of this poem

(i.e., death and democracy) by inserting them into a logic of disavowal. Thus, there is no

death, for the soldier dies to redeem/save the Fatherland, where the latter is coterminous

with the full presence of an organic/ethnic community rooted in the soil and blood of the

Nation (as a kind of French version of the Volkgemeinschaft, then).

Jean-Jospeh Weerts, La Mort de Bara, 1883.

163
This rather poetic chiasmus, which to my mind synthesizes the dilemma of democracy as it intersected
with the sociale in the République sociale, comes from LaCapra’s gloss on Jean-Luc Nancy’s La
Communauté désoeuvrée, in ibid., p. 60.
 196

The “Dormeur,” in other words, (and no doubt this explains some of the poem’s

popularity in the late nineteenth century) would prefigure the proto-fascist revanchisme

of the early Third Republic as a kind of literary equivalent of Jean-Joseph Weerts’s

gruesome portrait of Joseph Bara; or indeed as a kind of companion to the massively

popular, soft-core nationalist pornography that was Le Tour de France par deux enfants.

To be clear, there is a very precise sense in which Weerts’s Bara (unlike David’s,

incidentally) and Fouillée’s Tour de France par deux enfants express a kind of eerily

proto-fascist vision of the community (for, by definition, fascist politics of the

community holds that the stasis of the organic community is disturbed by the intrusion of

a foreign body).

In brief, when it comes to Weerts’s tableau, one can’t help but notice that a

narrative structure, that is absent, or merely alluded to, in David’s Bara, is erected around

the moment of Bara’s agony. The child’s agony is thus inserted into an explicit teleology

justifying the ultimate sacrifice of dying in combat against a brutal, barbaric Other in

order to save the transcendent Patrie. Note as well the slightly odd exoticism by which a

colonial imaginary slips into the visual narrative of Bara’s death (i.e., the leopard skin

draping the horse which Bara gave his life to defend).164 It bears pointing out, however,

that in historical terms, the Other who slays Bara is also a “same” – that is, a Frenchman

from the Vendée. In other words, the division being alluded to is not a “natural” one, but

a social one; the “Other” is is neither external nor natural, but internal and political.

164
Supra, Jean-Joseph Weerts, La Mort de Bara (1883).
 197

Jean-Joseph Weerts, Portrait de Jospeh Bara, 1883.

The increasing importance of disciplinary apparatuses of power and of the child

as biopolitical “capital” are also alluded to by the single detail that most vividly

distinguishes Weerts’s Bara from David’s: military dress.165 As Jean-Clément Martin

notes, this reinscription of David’s La Mort de Bara occurs precisely in the 1880s, at a

moment when the Third Republic was a political structure desperately searching for roots

that would legitimate its otherwise tenuous hold on power.166 An important role,

moreover, in this struggle for legitimacy was played by the institution of the republican

school, an institution that, as Denis Provencher and Luke Eilderts have demonstrated in

their study of Lavisse’s pedagogical method on Republican history, saw its mission as

creating a “new generation of petits écoliers (…) trained as good citizen-soldiers,

165
Supra, Jean-Joseph Weerts, Portrait de Joseph Bara (1883). For more on the intersections of the
institution of the school and practices of disciplinary power, see obviously Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et
Punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), cf. especially the chapter, “Les bons moyens de
redressement”. See also Robert Tombs’ France, 1814-1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), pp.
48-56; and Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997). For an extended analysis of Weert’s Bara, see Jean-Clément Martin’s, “Bara: de l’imaginaire
révolutionnaire à la mémoire nationale,” in La Mort de Bara, op. cit., pp.101-8.
166
J.C. Martin, art. cit., p. 101.
 198

exhibiting a love for their rifles, fellow man, and nation (…).” In other words, in the

Republican school of the fin-de-siècle, “[e]ducation and military service [were]

intricately linked”167 within the larger historical project of “regenerating the Nation” and,

eventually, of avenging it for the wrongs of the Franco-Prussian war. As Littré wrote, at

approximately the same moment that the Third Republic schools made gymnastics

compulsory and created little bataillons scolaires in order to teach (male) children how to

shoot rifles, “we must bring up [our children] in suspicion and hostility; we must teach

them that military drill is their primary task; we must drum into them that they must be

ready to kill and be killed.”168

It is hardly surprising that in such conditions Weert’s “tableau est (…) reproduit

et diffusé dans les écoles, en plusieurs centains de milliers d’exemplaires.”169 Bara

returns, and for all his visual transformation, on some formal, ideological level he

performs an essentially similar role, namely, that of ratifying the emergent political

structure of a country that has just faced a humiliating defeat at the hands of a foreigner,

and that is fighting off royalist claims to power and political legitimacy.170 It is perhaps

not so surprising to see, in Weert’s 1883 La Mort de Bara, a spectacle of massive

violence, portraying the young republican, and by association the young Republic, as

assailed on all sides by blood-thirsty, provincial brigands. Thus in terms of historical

context, a kind of contradiction, an unbearable tension is generated as the motif of

167
Denis Provencher and Luke Eilderts, “The Nation According to Lavisse: Teaching Masculinity and
Male Citizenship in Third-Republic France” French Cultural Studies 18:31 (2007) , pp. 32-34.
168
Cited in, Robert Tombs, France: 1814-1914 ((London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 53.
169
J.C. Martin, op. cit., p. 102.
170
In the elections of the 1870s, majorities were split between conservatives and monarchists, with the
latter taking parliamentary victories up until the legislative elections of 1876-1877. As Charles Sowerwine
points out, the Third Republic was envisioned initially as a transition government towards a sort of
constitutional monarchy, until the monarchist pretender lost the support of conservatives over the issue of
the “tricolore,” or Republican flag. See, Charles Sowerwine, France Since 1870: Culture, Politics and
Society (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 27-38.
 199

internal division is elided in favour of a biopolitical discourse focussing on the threat to

the territory and the population represented by an external enemy. Weerts’s tableau thus

attempts to remind the spectator that the recent République une et indivisible faced a

military menace not from conservatives or Communards, but from a foreign enemy that

shattered the territorial unity of the Republic; an enemy that future generations would

have to be willing to confront. It is a visually terrifying work, but it is also a

“visualization of the terrifying that must endlessly put the Republic in danger so that it

can better defend itself.”171

As in Weerts’s Bara, the mode of identity put forth in Augustine Fouillée’s Le

Tour de France is one of organic substance and the celebration of the “virtues of the

land”.172 As Mona and Jacques Ozouf point out, the children’s constant narrative refrain

is: “where are we, exactly?”173 The narrative is thus symbolically mapping out the

problem of situating the child vis-à-vis a Nation which also must be epistemologically

stabilized as a coherent community without lacunae. This is accomplished not only on a

diegetical level but also on the level of plot. Political division is evacuated from the text,

cosmopolitan and revolutionary Paris is marginalized in favor of an apotheosis of the

provinces, internal differences that worried the Republicans of 1792, such as patois and

local customs, are folded into the larger narrative of France’s grandeur, and the text tidily

wraps up in marital and martial bliss (Julien gets married while his brother André joins

the colonial army in Algeria).174

171
Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic, op. cit., p. 306.
172
Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Jacques Revel, “The Beauty of the Dead,” in Heterologies:
Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 125.
173
Jacques and Mona Ozouf, “The Little Red Book of the Republic,” in Realms of Memory, vol. 2, Pierre
Nora, ed., pp. 128-9.
174
Jacques and Mona Ozouf, op. cit., pp. 129-31.
 200

Yet, this epistemologico-topological refrain could also be taken as a sort of return

of the culturally repressed. As the Ozoufs remind us, the defeat of 1871 generated both

the mytheme of the “map,” where not knowing exactly where one was led to defeat,

humiliation and the fragmentation of the territory, 175 and, as a sort of will to knowledge,

actually led to an explosion of cartography as a discipline that was subsequently used to

map both the national identity and as an instrument of geopolitical domination in the

colonies of the French Empire.

What follows from this kind of imaginary matrix is a “natural” community that

is not only grounded, en-raciné, in a shared substance of Being, but from which social

antagonisms have been entirely evacuated.176 Le Tour de la France par deux enfants can

be read as a narrative of organic communities; of community as an holistic structure

whose natural balance of the order of things can only be upset or interrupted by the

presence of a scandalous Other representing a kind of a contagion in the body politic.

This scandalous Other can only be foreign to the community in every sense: the

Cosmopolitan intellectual, the Jew, the Arab, the Socialist, and, paradoxically, the

Parisian. The unspoken political fantasy implicitly put forth by these two little enfants de

175
Ibid.. See also, Peter Starr, Commemorating Trauma: the Paris Commune and its Cultural Aftermath
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); Bertrand Taithe, Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and
Warfare in the Making of Modern France (Lanham, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); and, on the
problem of maps and the French army, the archetypical example (forming a kind of ideological pendant to
the intersections between violence, science and capitalism in La Curée) here would be Emile Zola, La
Débâcle (Paris: Pocket 1993).
176
One must wonder, however, what fate awaits those – say, the fantasmatic shadows of the absent workers
– who represent a gap in this share, who are alienated from, excepted from, but whose exception constitutes
the very condition of elaboration of this share of national/identitary essence. Mona and Jacques Ozouf were
the first to comment upon the strange absence of workers in the diegesis of Le Tour de la Franc par deux
enfants. Such an absence might be read as symptomatic in both an ideological and a psychoanalytic sense
as a kind of dé-crit – a narrative gap, or hole, through which a repressed trauma, that is, the massacre of the
working-classes upon which the Third Republic was founded, escapes into symbolization. Thus it appears
that the very project undertaken in the narrative of Le Tour de la France sets the stage for its own
breakdown, presenting cracks in the level of its narrative. Who, in the 1890s, could have really forgotten
that the Commune drew heavily from the same artisan classes that are benignly represented in Fouillée’s
story – whose two protagonists are, furthermore, two vagabond orphans?
 201

la patrie are those that the twentieth century will not be unfamiliar with – not only total

identification with the Master-Signifier that is the Patrie, a physical identification, in the

sense that the two children learn about France via the “soles of their feet,” as the Ozoufs

put it, but also a love of/for it.177

After the Franco-Prussian debacle and the trauma of the Commune, it’s not

enough to be French. One must love France precisely because the “Other” does not. It is

perhaps no chance event of history that Fouillée’s book should have had the kind of

phenomenal success that it had in its fin-de-siècle day, being distributed as academic

prizes in the same Republican schools whose walls were adorned with reproductions of J.

J. Weert’s portraits of Bara, well into the early twentieth century.

As should be obvious, our own argument is that the “Dormeur” is decidedly not a

“biopolitical” poem; it is not a poem positing the security of the homeland as under threat

from a pathologized other. What remains to be carried out, however, is an analysis of the

poem itself that accounts for the specificity of the political engagement being articulated

in it. In sum, there may indeed an engagement for the Republic, but, as Murphy and

Bobillot have alerted us, for which Republic remains to be seen.

No small amount of ambiguity exists concerning the nature of the political

institution that succeeded the Second Empire in early September of 1870. Although a

Republic was indeed proclaimed on 4 September, factionalism was rife within it from the

very beginning, with conservative politicians hastening to beat the left to the Hôtel de

Ville in order to be the first to proclaim the Empire’s fall. Shortly thereafter, the

government quickly transitioned to one of National Defense headed by a “provisional

177
Jacques and Mona Ozouf, art. cit., p. 128. Indeed, the refrain that opens, closes, and runs throughout Le
Tour de la France… is “France aimée, nous sommes tes enfants…” Georges Bruno (aka, Augustine
Fouillée), Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (Paris: Librairie Classique Eugène Belin, 1907), p. 300.
 202

government.” And indeed this “provisional government” headed by Thiers was filled

from the beginning (a situation that would only be aggravated by the elections of

February 8, 1871) with figures that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century would

eventually come to associate with the “ennemis de la République”: bonapartists, who

remained largely in control of the military well into the late 1870s, monarchists elected to

a majority in 1871, hard-line Catholics and conservatives of all stripes, to say nothing of

anti-semitic Nationalists, etc. As Jean-Pierre Bobillot recently wrote, this point is an

important one for those who would argue that it was the “Republic” which would later

crush the Commune. In his analysis, the only Republic in existence in 1871 is that of the

Commune. Theoretically astute as this hypothesis is, it does raise some chronological, if

not historical, questions: what, for instance, is the situation of the Republic in 1870? Is it

to be found merely in the calls to continue the war against Prussia? Even Bobillot

manages to get mired in the complexity of the historical context of 1870, first arguing

that the Third Republic emerges ipso facto from the fall of the Second Empire, and a few

lines later conceding that the “République concurrente” in Versailles wasn’t the Republic,

which, in any event, will not formally exist until the (very narrow) Wallon amendment in

1875. At base, Bobillot is using “Le Dormeur du Val” as a pretext for refuting Marcelin

Pleynet’s pacifist reading of the text, a reading which Bobillot asserts is secretly

advancing an anti-republican, if not crypto-fascist, politics (for clarification’s sake,

Bobillot accuses Pleynet of surreptitiously seeking to rehabilitate the image of Philippe

Pétain):
 203

[C]e sont toujours les ennemis de la République (…) qui feront tout pour en retarder
l’établissement définitif (…) et, une fois instaurée durablement, pour la renverser (crise
boulangiste, affaire Dreyfus, Croix de feu, etc.)178

The conclusion we might take from Bobillot’s argument is the following: he’s

right to underscore the existence of competing visions of the Republic in the year 1870-

71. However, if in the fall of 1870, we are not in any precise historical or political sense

within a republican political regime, then we need to be cautious when we claim that this

is a poem operating as a vector for political identification. If it is engaged with a

republican project, it is indeed engaged with an anticipated République sociale that will

eventually, and briefly, emerge in the spring of 1871 in Paris. In any event, an immense

confusion surrounded the question of the Republic in the early Fall of 1870 – a confusion

that, as Peter Starr has convincingly demonstrated,179 is not only a key symptomatic

feature of textualizations of the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war, but that also must be

understood as one of the very conditions of possibility of the Paris Commune. Indeed,

such confusion may be said to be ontologically constitutive of democracy itself, with its

confusion generated by the fragmentation of representation, confusion generated in the

heterological prolixity of debate, confusion stemming from the groundless, performative

nature of its origin, and indeed stemming from the absence at the very site of power in

democracy.

Before we proceed any further, let us take a moment to take stock of our argument

thus far. First, “pacifist” readings of this poem have, for political and philological

reasons, generally fallen into critical disrepute. What we are claiming is the following:

readings of “Le Dormeur” that are sympathetic to discredited pacifist heuristics of the

178
Jean-Pierre Bobillot, art. cit., pp. 75-6. As Bobillot points out at the end of this historico-political
analysis, this tension between the Republic and its enemies comes to its logical conclusion with Vichy,
which finally manages to “liquidate” the Republic.
179
Peter Starr, op. cit., pp. 30-34.
 204

text do not necessarily lead directly to an analysis of the poem as indulging, as Bobillot

might have it, in the kind latent, proto-fascist political tendencies of late-nineteenth-

century France that one can detect in Weerts’s re-painting of Bara, or indeed in Fouillée’s

children’s tale. Second, an analysis of the text that advances the hypothesis of its

rejection of the spectacle of modern war between European Nation States does not make

it incompatible with a political engagement for (or with the ideals of) a social republic,

given that one of the ideals articulated by proponents of la Sociale was precisely to

promote solidarity, if not peace, amongst the working-classes on an international scale.

We’ll have to wait for 1914 to see this ideal devastated. As Steve Murphy argued in his

analysis of “Morts de quatre-vingt-douze,” and as Pierre Brunel has suggested elsewhere,

the notion that the enemies of the working-class are not foreign workers or soldiers, but

their own political elite it is still very much operable and a part of oppositional discourse

in 1870.180 There is little doubt, in any case, as to Rimbaud’s sympathies for republican

movements, and still less as to where he placed not only his sympathy but his ideological

allegiance.181 As Graham Robb points out, citing a horrified Izambard in October of

1870, Rimbaud was active in local political debate clubs during his stay in Douai,

creating a mini-scandal by signing a letter in Izambard’s name that sought to rehabilitate

the vocative “citoyen,” the rhetoric of which was “bathed in the red glow of

revolution.”182 The question remains as to whether or not we can confidently establish the

extent to which the political left understood in the early autumn of 1870 (as opposed to,

180
Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op. cit., pp. 52-3. Pierre Brunel, op. cit., p. 32.
181
Cf., Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la Commune, op. cit. and Jean-Pierre Bobillot, art. cit.
182
Graham Robb, op. cit., p. 51. See also, Jean-Pierre Azéma et Michel Winock, La Troisième République,
pp. 56-60. “ Dans le compte rendu [de la réunion électorale à Douai], le résumé [de Rimbaud] se termine
sur une recommandation très nette : ‘(…)tout Français, aujourd’hui, doit être républicain démocrate.’ ” in,
Steve Murphy, op. cit., pp. 114-5.
 205

say, by late October) that the right’s rhetoric about la guerre à outrance against the

Prussian armies was just lip-service coming from a bunch of républicains malgré eux.

Faced with such aporias, perhaps the posture to adopt is the following: the text is clearly

mobilizing its own context, but it is not entirely clear how, or to what end.

Finally, given this ambivalence in both the text and its historical context, in order

to do interpretative justice to the poem, we ought at least to attempt to account for the odd

and persistent failures of language both as an instrument for designating and

apprehending one’s phenomenological experience of the world, and the sonnet as a

canonical poetic structure in the mid-nineteenth century. As we now turn towards our

reading of “Le Dormeur du Val,” let us first consider, in light of the above reflections on

anxiety, trauma, and the strange temporality of deferral, the use of time in “Le Dormeur

du Val”.

XIII. L’Homme, cette nuit: the Sleeper’s Strange Use of Time

Au niveau de la nature, l’homme est un absurde, un trou dans l’être.

-Louis Althusser

Le Dormeur du val

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière

Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,

Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme

Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme:
Nature, berce-le chaudement: il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine;

 206

Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine

Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

October 1870 Arthur Rimbaud183

With respect to time and understanding, is not the paradox of the “Dormeur du

Val” the very mode by which its diegesis, its approach towards the site of its meaning,

the revelation of being-toward-death in the opening of the valley, slowed down almost

unbearably, and incomprehensibly? The paradox resides in the text’s temporal saturation,

its slow, insistent, and retrospectively horrifying approach towards the brute fact of

human finitude that, in its very approach of slow deliberation, frustrates our capacity to

“understand” the scene that is set before us? We must, however, take the structural,

semantic, and hermeneutic dislocations that this strange use of time produces as

absolutely crucial to the poem’s overall effect on the reader: for what is generated is a

gap, a hole in meaning separating the moment of perception and the instant of

apprehension. For indeed, upon re-reading the text, one notices a series of rhetorical

misdirections that appear retrospectively as moments of intentional anxiogenesis,184

moments intended to make the reader apprehensive but that rely on rhetorical or

structural devices such as periphrasis, litote, antiphrasis and enjambments at the caesurae

and between lines of verse to maintain a semantic anamorphosis throughout the text that

defers the moment of disclosure (and indeed, perhaps fails to disclose anything at all).

The disheveled nature of the soldier’s dress, his cap-less head for instance, could at first

be taken as a kind of joyous antidisciplinary metonym of natural freedom.

Retrospectively, of course, it becomes one in a series residual traces of a violent death

183
Arthur Rimbaud, “Le Dormeur du Val,” in Œuvres Complètes, A. Guyaux, éd. (Paris: Gallimard, 2009),
p. 112.
184
See Benoît de Cornulier, “Rimbaud: Chercher son rythme,” art. cit.
 207

that we hadn’t been able to perceive. The same holds for the posture of the body, which is

of course less idyllic, less “tranquille” than funereal (i.e., “la main sur la poitrine”).

Critics such as Chocheyras, Laurent, Bobillot, and, especially, Murphy185 have all

traced out the infratextual connections between these elements and prior poems in

Rimbaud’s early verse work that offer up a decidedly less morbid relationship between

the human and the natural world, where the topos of nature, and the body’s liberation

from the cultural discipline of clothing (e.g., caps, uniforms, etc.) designate the positive

content of a dream of freedom characteristic of the young poet’s work. In particular,

Bobillot and Cocheyras186 have noted the near identity of the syntagme “tête nue (…) la

nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu” and the following hemistiche from one of the

earliest poems by Rimbaud, “Sensation”: “…je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue”.187

What deserves further attention however, is the qualitative rupture in terms of an

important isotopia: that is, in the representation of Nature, in the relationship between

Nature and the human that occurs in “Le Dormeur du Val”. After “Le Dormeur du Val,”

one searches in vain for the monovalent optimism of fusional jouissance with Nature that

can easily be found in some of the earliest poems of Rimbaud (i.e., from the spring and

summer of 1870) such as “Sensation” or “Credo in Unam”.

Surprisingly, Claude Duchet was the first to rightly point towards this rupture. If

anything, the contrast between the raw, ontic immanence of the world and the human

185
Jacques Chocheyras, art. cit; Jean-François Laurent, art. cit. ; Jean-Pierre Bobillot, op. cit. ; Steve
Murphy, op. cit.; Manami Imura, “Originalités de Sensation: au-delà des modèles et topois,” in Parade
sauvage, hommage à Steve Murphy, op. cit., pp. 309-323.
186
Jean-François Laurent, ibid.
187
Pierre Brunel also points to “Sensation” as a possible infratextual source. Implicitly if adroitly
commenting on the shift in the status of nature, Brunel notes: “[l]a nature essaierait en vain de le
réchauffer.” Pierre Brunel, Rimbaud (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2002), pp. 34-5. However, if Brunel makes
this insightful move, he has unfortunately already undermined it a page earlier by claiming that, given the
possible hypotextual relation to Leconte de Lisle’s “La fontaine aux lianes,” the “[Dormeur] tient encore du
pasticcio.” Ibid., p. 32.
 208

figure in it suggests, for Duchet, the unbearable inhumanity of Nature with respect to

human suffering, a point for which other readings have neglected to adequately

account.188 The “rupture” (if rupture there is) in the status of Nature in “Le Dormeur du

Val” is a critical one. Ultimately, it is the occasion of a strictly political refusal to

naturalize the death of the soldier by inserting it into an nationalist and ethnocentric

discourse that by the end of the nineteenth century increasingly makes appeals to human

sciences such as demography (birth), anthropology (race), and geography (blood and soil)

in order to ground the differences between nations in a natural order.

Along these lines, the sense of the apostrophe in line eleven (“Nature, berce-le

chaudement: il a froid”) ought indeed to be understood as an appeal that falls on radically

deaf ears. It is revealing that this sole and final (implicit) instance of a lyrical subject is

utterly helpless, invoking a transcendental agency that literally breaks-down and can do

nothing when faced with the irremediable infantia of death. Graphically separating the

lyrical voice from the infinite silence of the “dormeur” is yet another clue that something

is deeply awry in this idyllic tableau. The colon separating these two subjects ought to be

read as two holes puncturing the right side of the body of the text itself, as wounds

retrospectively transforming “il a froid” into a periphrasis for the proverbial icy grip of

death.

This scene of failed interlocution may in fact be the scene of a rupture in

Rimbaud’s corpus marked by, and coinciding with, a qualitative shift in the

representation of Nature. When the text “zeros in,” passing from a vast topological hole,

through the hole of the mouth, and finally settles on these two small fatal wounds (also

periphrastically referred to as “trous”) which, precisely, hold the key to the poem, it is
188
Claude Duchet, art. cit.
 209

appropriate to see in this movement a sort of rendering-unheimlich of Nature itself.

Whereas Duchet, Brunel, and others189 have picked up on an important topical contrast

between Nature as a simple and sympathetic mechanism for visually contrasting the lush

vibrancy of a summer valley with the pathos-inducing spectacle of a dead soldier, I

believe that the point is rather to note that, although Nature is still appealed to as a

maternal force, this appeal is altogether articulated in vain. If anything, Nature here is

much closer to that “Dieu qui rit” at the spectacle of the “folie épouvantable” of warfare

than it is to the benevolently regenerative pagan cosmos of, say, “Soleil et chair”.190 On

this note, we can only agree with Bobillot that the poem both steadfastly refuses to

idealize Nature, and also manages to impoverish Nature by dressing it in “haillons”.191

The hole remains nothing more than collapsed space, and (Mother) Nature is, if

not radically Evil, a kind of locus suspectus incapable of guaranteeing meaning in the

form of a “démenti énergique de la puissance de la mort,”192 as in the tradition of

Lamartine’s “Le Vallon,” or de Lisle’s “La fontaine aux lianes”. To Nature’s “in-

humanity” (if such qualifications make sense), Rimbaud’s “Dormeur” pairs an equally

inhuman, lyrical partner: here, there’s neither a lyrical subject, nor the possibility of a

“Nature [qui] est là, qui t’invite et qui t’aime”.193 Nature is little more than a site of

decomposition, if not, gleefully a bit more sadistic, as Duchet and others’ readings might
189
Claude Duchet, art. cit. ; Pierre Brunel, op. cit., p. 33 ; Jacques Chocheyras, art. cit.
190
Arthur Rimbaud, “Le Mal,” O.C., op. cit., p. 93.
191
Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Le meurtre d’Orphée, op. cit., p. 195. Murphy has suggestively proposed, on the
contrary, that this be read in a sociocritical light as a reference to the impoverished working-classes whom
it is the République sociale’s mission to protect. If Nature here is to function as an allegory of the
Revolution, however, then we must account for the fact that it is more frequently in counter-revolutionary
caricature that one finds allegories of the Republic dressed in rags. This is true from the time of the Terror
and remains so well into the aftermath of the Semaine sanglante, but does not preclude the possibility of a
reappropriation and re-valorization of a denigrating ideologeme akin, for example, to the reinscription of
the vocable “crapule” in “Le Forgeron”. See Gay Gulickson, The Unruly Women of Paris. See also, Claude
Langlois, La Caricature contre-révolutionnaire (Paris: Presses du CRNS, 1988).
192
Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 237.
193
Lamartine, “ Le Vallon ,” op. cit., p. 33.
 210

implicitly suggest.194 In “Le Dormeur du Val,” it is possible to detect something on the

order of a nightmarish subversion of the erotico-lyrical tradition of the idyll. With this

sonnet, the lyrical subject organizing and making sense of the world disappears in the

encounter a cadaver lying senselessly in a “trou de verdue” (i.e., nature itself has, by a

kind of play of antonomasia and metonymy, become a grave-site).

As readers of “Le Dormeur du Val” attempting to make theoretical sense of the

rhetorical and structural strategy that is saturated with misdirection, we are ultimately

dealing with a phenomenon that Slavoj Žižek describes as a gap, a kind of failure in or

break-down of the symbolic (in this case, the sonnet) in which one detects a faint

“murmur of the Real.”195 In a manner that is poetically slightly uncanny, as readers of

“Le Dormeur du Val,” when we come across the “two holes” of the excipit, we do a kind

of double-take. We are faced, in other words, with the kind of temporal disjunction that

corresponds to that of a (traumatic) event’s occurrence and the time of its registration in

the formation of a symptom, for example, the existence of which may be ascribed to the

subject’s attempt to retrospectively gain mastership over the possibility of its own

absence, over das Ding: “[T]he act of (symbolic) registration, the ‘second-take’, always

comes after a minimal delay and remains forever incomplete, cursory, a gap separating it

from the In-itself, as if the ‘thing’ in question can fully realize its ontological status only

by means of a minimal delay with regard to itself.” 196

194
“Le poème de Rimbaud montre moins l’indifférence insolente de la Nature, que l’inutilité de sa chaleur
amie…” Claude Duchet, art. cit., p. 376, n. 1.
195
On the question of the interruption of the symbolic, see also Julia Kristeva, Soleil Noir: mélancolie et
depression (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 45-66. I’m grateful to Bruno Chaouat for this reference.
196
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), p.
59. Italics mine. Lacan’s notion of das Ding is a complex one, but in essence we can define the term as a
terrifying kernel of the real saturated with jouissance which manages to erupt into the symbolic but which
cannot be tamed or domesticated by meaning. Das Ding, the impossible thing, is strictly speaking meaning-
less; it cannot be reduced to signifying operations like metaphor or metonymy, whence its medusa-like
 211

Taken in this sense, “Le Dormeur du Val” is a perfectly anamorphic sonnet. It is

text that puts into subtle but persistent relief the very poetic and rhetorical mechanisms it

deploys in order to ceaselessly defer, or to frustrate meaning by producing an encounter

with the absence of signification, thus locking us in a loop of endless readings, re-

readings, and mis-readings. On the surface, we appear to be operating as readers within

the entirely consistent and intelligible poetic imaginary of the idyll, were it not for one or

two inconsistent, frankly absurd details (or dé-crits) that form a series of inexplicable

blots,197 or sites of non-sense, in the tableau from which, or to which, the real returns.

The “real” that returns in this text is ultimately the encounter with the very

“impossibility” of the subject, poetic or otherwise. Let us understand by “impossibility”

the radically inassimilable, heterogeneous nature of the cadaver in the realm of the

imaginary.198 Such a reading of the poem leads one to the conclusion that Rimbaud

deliberately set up this poem in order to frustrate not only its legibility on the level of

poetics, but also to retroactively prevent any uninterrogated identification with the dead

soldier. The encounter with the “holes” in the final line of verse is of course preceded by

impact on the subject. See, Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W.
Norton and Co., 1992), pp. 19-71.
197
I borrow, or deterritorialize, rather, this concept from Žižek’s discussion of the use of the tracking shot
in Hitchcock’s cinematic oeuvre, where he locates amongst the latter’s techniques an inverted kind of
phenomenon whereby the too-rapid approach to the traumatic “obscene object of enjoyment” (e.g., a dead-
body) similarly produces a kind of missed encounter on the level of meaning. “(…) [D]elay and
precipitousness are two modes of capturing the object-cause of desire, objet a, the “nothingness of pure
seeming.” Žižek goes on to add that “the heterogenous element (…) must remain an inert, nonsensical
“blot” if the rest of the picture is to acquire the consistency of a symbolic reality.” Slavoj Žižek, Looking
Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: October
Books, 1992), pp. 93-95. In a relatively recent study, Jean-François Laurent too is compelled to
acknowledge a semi-cinematic aspect to the poem in order to account for what one might call the “zooming
focalization” (i.e., the slow movement from a large hole in nature to the “close-up,” metonymic shot of the
two bullet-holes in the body of the solider) that characterizes the poem, as though the “Dormeur” too might
be an early instance of what Christophe Wall-Romana has theorized as a “cinépoetics”. For Laurent, the
final image could indeed be considered a “gros plan,” and he goes on to mention that: “[o]n peut certes dire
que Rimbaud procède, comme le fera plus tard le cinéma, par succession de cadrages caractéristiques (…)”.
Jean-François Laurent, art. cit., p. 21.His reference here is James W. Brown’s “Le Dormeur du Val, a
Cinematic Reading,” cf., J.F. Laurent, ibid., p. 26, n. 1.
198
See Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1983).
 212

the series of punctemes (colons, semi-colons) in the preceding tercet. Thus, the text

mimetically produces gaps in its own symbolic tissue, anticipates its own series of

failures to disclose, or forclose, the traumatic encounter at the very site where,

traditionally in the sonnet, meaning is produced and sutured to the text.199 As Théodore

de Banville affirmed in his Petit traité de poésie française, “le dernier vers d’un Sonnet

doit contenir la pensée du Sonnet tout entière.”200 Esthetically, then, we may just as easily

argue that in “Le Dormeur du Val,” Rimbaud is deploying a normatively acceptable

poetic technique (i.e., synthesizing the entire sonnet in the last line) but to a

systematically disruptive and metonymic, rather than metaphorical, end (if we think of

metaphorical procedures as being essentially operations of identitary equivalence). On its

most basic level, the final rhyme/line of verse is indeed a kind of condensation of the

entire sonnet, but the point is precisely that it, ex post facto, radically displaces the

semantic and esthetic domain we were situated in: the “Dormeur” may be sleeping, but in

the sense of course that death may be ironically referred to as an eternal “slumber”.

“Le Dormeur du Val” is thus a deeply subversive text in the specific sense that it

points towards, without seeking to sublate, radically irreconcilable antagonisms between

form and content, between ideal and reality, that are ripping lyrical poetry apart at its

textual seams. In a sense, the poem stages a kind of encounter with the Kantian noumenal

sublime, putting forth the image of something like a limit-concept, a “sublime object of

199
Elisa Marder and Susan Blood argue in their respective readings of Baudelaire’s sonnet “À une passante”
that the tercets are always poetic sites where not only meaning but loss and trauma are designated and
articulated. Susan Blood, “The Sonnet as Snapshot: Seizing the Instant in Baudelaire’s ‘À une passante’,”
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 36:3-4 (Spring-Summer, 2008), pp. 255-70; Elissa Marder, Dead Time:
Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), pp. 68-88.
200
Théodore de Banville, Petit traité de poésie française (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), pp. 201: “Lamartine
disait qu’il doit suffire de lire le dernier vers d’un Sonnet; car, ajoutait-il, un Sonnet n’existe pas si la
pensée n’en est pas violemment et ingénieusement résumée dans le dernier vers. (…) Oui, le dernier vers
d’un Sonnet doit contenir la pensée du Sonnet tout entière.”
 213

ideology” (i.e., dulce et decorum est pro patria mori) which, the closer one gets to it, the

more one approaches and inspects it, transmogrifies into an object of absolute,

unspeakable horror à l’état pur.

Crucially, it is at the very site in the sonnet where meaning is supposed to emerge

on an imaginary level that Rimbaud short-circuits any meaning-full identification of, or

full identification with the figure of the dead soldier. By extension, the desirability of

imitating the example contained in this transcendental signifier, of dying for the

fatherland, is also short-circuited.

Paradoxically, however, one level of identification remains possible – a kind of

potential zero-degree identification without particularities is nevertheless preserved in the

poem. Such potential identification is semiotically designated by the very absence of

vestimentary markers of particularity that would allow the reader to identify the

nationality of the soldier. It is in this absence that Rimbaud conjoins esthetic and political

subversion. For the cadaver is indeed a terrifying (non)figure. It is a limit-point of

impossibility for the subject. Crucially, though, Rimbaud also stages this nightmarish

encounter with radical absence as an encounter with a kind of raw phenomenon of

humanity. The inhumanity of war is signified precisely by this designation of the fragile,

vulnerability of the human body whose ultimate, inescapable destiny is to be reduced to

the bare humanity of the cadaver – the cadaver, in other words, is the human being

stripped of all of its phenomenal aspects, all of its qualifying qualities save one: its

continued belonging to the symbolic community despite the fact that this figure is
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deprived of even the minimal symbolic inscription and ritual of a proper burial and a

grave-site.201

XIV. Post-Traumatic Sonnet Syndrome

In this section I would like to explore the presence in this poem of a traumatic

encounter with death in order to examine how, in those spaces where the dire appears to

fail, the poet manages to articulate a critique of violence, a strategic refusal of war

through the comment-dire of the poem itself. As a preliminary step, a brief word on the

concept of “poetics of trauma” (or a poetraumatics) is necessary.

The traumatic event, as Cathy Caruth argues, is “the violence of history (…the

shock of a confrontation with death that is compulsively repeated in the present), an

awakening out of death (and into life) for which there was no preparation.”202 It is a

question of the repressed past that wasn’t “lived,” that expresses itself through a neurotic

symptom – especially the repetition compulsion – but also, as Lacan postulates, through

the lesions (the wounds – trauma) of language itself.203 The traumatic encounter repeated

and reconstructed in the lines of this alexandrine is that of the destruction of the subject –

a je which is also un autre. The poem asks us: Comment-dire la mort de soi/de l’autre,

for the enjeu of the traumatic is “how to speak” (comment dire) that which always wins

201
At base, one manner of reading the “Dormeur” is in the light of Lacan’s reading of Antigone and the
“second death” (and thus slightly against the grain of Baudelaire’s “Charogne”), the fundamental point of
which may be synthesized as follows: one doesn’t let a man rot in the sun like a dog. Jacques Lacan,
Seminar VII, op. cit., pp. 248, 262-6. LaCapra also points to the ritual of a “proper burial,” which Lacan
also elsewhere (cf., Écrits) describes as a critical inscription of the deads’ subject position as persistent
within the symbolic community of memory, as one of those absolute minimal symbolic provisions for
mourning to be possible. Dominck LaCapra, op. cit., p. 66.
202
Cathy Caruth, “Violence and time: Traumatic Survivals,” Assemblage 20 (Apr., 1993), p. 25.
203
Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, a
Selection, Bruce Fink, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), p. 85.
 215

out over the énoncé, that which eludes the speaking je? I think the response to this enjeu

comes precisely in the form of a jeux de formes/je déforme.

To illustrate this concept, I would like to examine some of the more salient

features of “poetraumatics” at work in this poem and what conclusions we may draw

from them. To begin with, let us consider the question of repetition, particularly those on

the level of micro-repetitions within the phonemes themselves. One is particularly struck

by the vocalic recurrences throughout the poem. There is an undeniable insistence on the

vocalic pair “[r]ou” in the first line – the setting of the scene – and in the 5th line, where

the reader/poet first catches sight of the soldier. He is presented “bouche ouverte,” hence

his mouth is deformed into just another “trou.” Finally, in the 14th line, the reader

stumbles upon these trous rouges that repeat in a displaced mode the [ru/ru] of the

sonnet’s opening hemistich,204 paronomastically pointing toward a possible doubling up

of the homonymic signified, “roux,” or “red”:

Vocalic repetitions : pair [r] ou / u

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière

Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,

Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme

Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;

Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

204
Which is itself a slightly atypical feminine caesura. Although this opening line of verse is genuinely
normative (1 proposition/syntagme per hemistich), and although the puncteme graphically reinforces the
pause at the caesura, it is difficult not to notice a visual, or phantom, repetition of the “rou” taking place at
the 6th and 7th position of the alexandrine: verdure,//ou
 216

Both the poet and the reader are hence compelled to repeat the trauma of the

wound in/through language and throughout the poem. The poem itself seems to be locked

into a proleptic structure. When we finally stumble upon the ultimate “trous,” they

function somewhat ambiguously, indirectly naming the horror at the heart of the poem,

but by their pairing and their symbolic positional contrast, they also send us hurtling back

to the first line of the poem itself (le trou de verdure), fixing the reader, as it were, within

the deferred time/meaning of the traumatic event. This final metonym, rather than fully

bringing forth or rendering present the sense of the poem, compels us to re-read it, to

repeat the encounter with death in an attempt to discern the anxiogenic signs that the poet

scattered throughout the poem but that we were not prepared to recognize.205

What’s more, if we draw our attention to the repetitive rhetoric of sleeping206 we

are obliged to draw one of two conclusions: either this is a disappointingly prosaic

description of a dead body, or this very strategy of rhetorical misdirection, of the

deployment of litotes and periphrasis, is in fact a further trace of the traumatic event in

language itself (and one might wonder “Why this prudishness? Why not a cadaver with a

little more panache?” especially from a poet who called Baudelaire a vrai dieu)?

Comment dire la mort ? Litotes and Periphrasis

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière

Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,

Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

205
A further link to the traumatic is its relationship not to an overwhelming event per se, but, as Freud
states, to the mind’s “lack of preparedness for anxiety.” Quoted in Caruth, op. cit., 25. Freud notes, on the
character of angoisse (anxiety, anguish) that it “designates a state characterized by the expectation of
danger and preparation for it.” Sigmund Freud, “Au-delà du principe de plaisir,” in Essais de psychanalyse
(Paris: Payot, 1981), p. 50. My translation.
206
See figure 4.
 217

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme

Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;

Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

In the tenth line of the sonnet, the soldier is infantilized; his smile is compared to

that of a sick child. In line seven, he is positioned sous les nues. Between this comparison

and this position, there is a submerged, etymological link. In Freud’s view, childhood, as

is well known, functions as the site of an unconscious knowledge,207 in the sense that

coming into existence is traumatic, but also to the extent that there is an analogical

relationship between the two. Like the traumatic, childhood is less a point of origin

localized in the past than a force operating in the psychic present of the subject. As for

the nues, it signifies, according to the Petit Robert, “clouds.” And yet, there are two

fixed, and somewhat contradictory, colloquial expressions attached to this noun: “tomber

des nues” is literally to be struck dumb, speechless, rendered in fans. “Tomber des nues,”

to be dumbstruck, a priori dismantles the other semantic possibility of “porter aux nues,”

which is the act of celebrating a hero, say, one who dies for the Fatherland (the tombé

pour la patrie). At work in the poem, then, is a typically rimbaldian polysemia, a

dérèglement des sens by which the poet simultaneously points towards the trope of the

celebration of death for the Fatherland and cancels out the dulce et decorum est, refusing

any possibility of celebrating (porter aux nues) the act of dying for the Patrie. Faced with

the stark incapacity to directly name the death of the subject, but compelled to repeat it

207
Jean-Pierre Bobillot is even more categorical, linking, within the context of this poem, the figure of
childhood to death itself in a reading that resonates with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s interrogations
of the structural temporality of the child and the ghost. See Jean-Pierre Babillot, Le meurtre d’Orphée, op.
cit., p. 197. See also, Giorgio Agamben, “In Playland: Reflections on History and Play,” in Infancy and
History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 65-88.
 218

throughout the text, it is the poet who “tomb(e) des nues.” The poet’s becoming-in fans

reduces the seemingly un-negotiable space of absolute difference between the je and the

autre (the living and the dead) and pushes him towards a sort of identification with the

anonymous soldier whose death is poetically, intimately, linked to that of the je.

These poetics of traumatism form a conjuncture at which the unspeakable, the

incommensurable is signposted. Though the poet never names (dire) death as such,

through the rhetorical mobilizations of litote and periphrases, through a play of comment-

dire, he nevertheless manages to speak as well as critique the ineffable abjection of war,

insisting in a whisper that the only thing that the State can ever produce when it mobilizes

the body-politic is an endless chain of tombés pour la patrie, cadavers. The cadaver is of

course etymologically (from cadere) linked to the supreme euphemism, or periphrasis for

a dead soldier who “falls” for his country. According to Julia Kristeva, as an instance of

the abject, the cadaver is also the almost-self, a point of impossible identification208 – a

conceptualization which is no doubt derived in final analysis from Freud’s seminal essay

on the uncanny, in which, of course, the theme of doubles (i.e., a splitting, or a confusion

regarding the integrity of the self, “de sorte qu’on ne sait plus à quoi s’en tenir quant au

moi propre”) is pervasive, but in which the cadaver, because of its dialectical relation to

the double (i.e., the fetish supposed to ward off death) is also explicitly nominated as a

key producer of the uncanny: “ce qui paraît au plus haut point étrangement inquiétant à

beaucoup de personnes est ce qui se rattache à la mort, aux cadavres, et au retour des

morts (…)”.209

208
Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, op. cit., pp. 10-11.
209
Sigmund Freud, “L’Inquiétante étrangeté,” art. cit., p. 246.
 219

A third and final element of poetraumatics is at work on the structural level of the

poem, in the form of constant and complex play of internal and external enjambments

known as rejets. Notice, for example, the grammatical parallelism between the opening

and closing caesura of the quatrains (“C’est un trou de verdure …Pâle dans son lit vert”).

This syntagmatic repetition suggests a parallel (if not metonymic identity) between the

hole in/of nature and the sleeper’s “bed,” whether we take the “trou de verdure” as a

valley or, more “morbidly,” as a grave, as Nature becoming an unmarked grave, perhaps

where a certain idyllic kind of poetry goes to die. Also noteworthy is the ultra-classic

alexandrine (so much so that it’s quite as though the text was drawing attention to its very

situation as poetry) that is, however, disrupted at the very end by an all-important rejet

that perhaps might also be read as semantically disqualifying a reading of the “main sur

la poitrine” as a patriotic gesture, as a performative oath of fidelity to, say, the army

(external rejets are italicized, internal rejets and contre-rejets are underscored):

Rejets

C'est un trou de verdure // où chante une rivière

Accrochant follement // aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil //, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val // qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche // ouverte, tête nue,

Et la nuque baignant // dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu // dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert // où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, – il dort. Souriant comme

Sourirait un enfant – malade, il fait un somme:
Nature, berce-le – chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas – frissonner sa narine ;

Il dort dans le soleil, – la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux – trous rouges au côté droit

A rejet is an effect of discordance within a poem that takes the form of

enjambment – the most basic description of which be the non-coincidence of grammar

 220

and structure, breaking the reader’s experience of syntactico-temporal unity or linearity

of a line of verse or hemistich, “rejecting” the end/final components of a phrase of one

line onto the beginning of the subsequent line of verse or the next hemistich.210 In itself,

it’s a little bold, but Victor Hugo and indeed the entire romantic generation certainly got

to this first on Hernani’s escalier dérobé. Furthermore, as Aquien points out, the rhythm

of one of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, the poem “Le Flacon,” is particularly tormented by

the use of rejet. As Murphy reminds us, Verlaine and indeed even de Banville were

known to make an audacious (ab)use of enjambment as much for stylistic flourish as to

emphasize their poems’ core rhetoric.211 However, neither Hugo nor Baudelaire pushed

this “breaking”/wounding of the alexandrine/sonnet as far as Rimbaud does here. Indeed,

reading the poem aloud is a complex affair: lines 3-4, 7-8, 10 and, crucially (because this

destabilizes our understanding of the complement tranquille) 14 are all in rejected

enjambments. Approximately half of the sonnet’s terminal alexandrines are “rejected,” so

to speak (this is to say nothing of the rich saturation of enjambments taking place at and

softening-up the caesura). But beyond this pressure on, or “rejection” of, poetic form,

Rimbaud in fact uses the subversion of verse poetry and canonical forms in order to

undermine the very spectacle of war as poeisis, rejecting a romanticized

textualisation/celebration of the violence of nationalistic fervor.

210
The definition of the poetic device of “rejet” is slightly more complicated than this somewhat reductive
synthesis perhaps lets on. It can function either internally (i.e., at the cesura separating one hemistiche from
another), as it can externally (the effect of disruption that we described above); it can also function between
stanzas. There is also a similar, if chiasmatic, form of enjambment commonly called “contre-rejet.” In
contre-rejet, the phenomenon is the opposite: i.e., the first few elements of a phrase are present in one line
whilst the rest of the proposition is in the next one. An example of contre-rejet can be found in “Le
Dormeur” in the entire second line which is attached as a modifier to the preceding noun “rivière.” See
Michèle Aquien, op. cit., pp. 87-92.
211
Ibid., p. 89. See also Steve Murphy’s pathbreaking article on Parnassus, “Versification ‘parnassiennes’
( ?),” Romantisme 140 :2 (2008), pp. 67-83.
 221

Rimbaud perhaps located a problematic overlapping of power and poetry; a

critical node at which, rather than patriotically identifying with the Nation, the poet

launches a revolt against a form of poetics that trancendentalizes war. As Jacques

Roubaud reminds us, the alexandrine was not only the poetic form par excellence right

up to the 1880s, it was also historically a poetic form that was intimately linked to power

– specifically one that, at its origins, celebrated imperial or monarchical power.212 Hence,

the insurrection taking place here might be seen as a doubly-articulated one – against

power, but also against poetry within poetry itself. It’s perhaps not the “death of the

alexandrine” that is to come in a poem like “Qu’est-ce pour nous mon coeur…,” but it is

a near fatal wounding of it to be sure. It is a bearing down on poetic form and tradition

that is highly revealing. Indeed, if we follow Rimbaud’s logics of revolt, of wounding the

semantic unity of language and the coherence of the poem, we might be tempted to return

to the title of the poem to “wound” its subject.213 Splitting the semantic unity of the

substantive (i.e., of being) apart allows us to obtain the “traumatic kernel” of the poem’s

secret (or, heime) message; it allows us to finally perceive in the traumatism of language,

in the shattering of the signifier the return of the repressed – death which manages to gain

the space of the énoncé, the poetic-dire: dor/meur Æ dort/ meurt. It’s as though the text

was struggling all along to bring into language an event which preceded it (i.e., the title)’

as though it was stammering, on the very verge of disclosing that this unheimlich sleeper

dies, was dead all along.

212
Roubaud refers to the medieval poems “Les Enfances d’Alexandre” et “Le(s) roman(s) d’Alexandre,”
from which the alexandrine derives its name. Jacques Roubaud, La Vieillesse d’Alexandre: essai sur
quelques états récents du vers français (Paris: François Maspero, 1978), pp. 7-9.
213
Steve Murphy points to this possible calembour in his recent, Rimbaud et la Commune: Microlectures et
perspectives, op. cit., pp. 111-13.
 222

XV. Conclusions.
Christ Asleep in the Valley, or: In What Sense is the Dormeur a Christic Figure?

Before we conclude, let us return briefly to the disagreement amongst critics as to

the meaning of the dead soldier in Rimbaud’s sonnet. We’ve seen that, for Duchet, the

figure of the “Dormeur” was initially highly ambiguous, one whose meaning, or,

ideological use-value, eludes the critic in final analysis. Indeed, Duchet cannot quite

settle on one reading (not that that’s necessary), and in the end leaves the question in

abeyance: perhaps it’s a poem of engagement, perhaps it’s a testament to the horrors of

warfare; perhaps it was first a kind of revolutionary hymn to the defense of the Republic

by an adolescent who wanted to join the army like his brother, but who quickly became

disenchanted with the decidedly unheroic gap separating the citizen-soldiers of 1792

from the small-town provincial volunteers, or patrouillotes, of the Ardennes in 1870, and

only subsequently a poem pointing towards the “indifférence insolente de la nature” with

respect to human suffering.214 Perhaps, without necessarily seeking to accommodate the

chou et la chèvre, it might be said that some of our difficulty in “pinning down” the

poem’s meaning ultimately stems from the fact that Rimbaud’s political posture becomes

more radical with the fall of the Second Empire than it was in the late summer of 1870.

We know for example that the manuscript of “Le Dormeur du Val” is dated

October of 1870, yet Duchet mentions dates as early as August of 1870 as potential

214
Claude Duchet, art. cit., p. 376. In fact, Duchet, explicitly, if somewhat without further support than an
apparently keen insight into the nature of adolescent rebellion and caprice, suggests as much: “Cette
mobilité des réactions est fort naturelle chez un tout jeune homme, embarassé par ses seize ans, tenté par le
cynisme et par l’action, et qui ne pardonne pas à celle-ci d’être grotesque.” Note that, underneath Duchet’s
argument, which is clearly sympathetic to Rimbaud’s work, runs a subtext that renders rebellion and
caprice strictly equivalent, repeating in displaced form and nearly a hundred years after the event, one of
the major tropes of anti-communard discourse. Ibid., p. 372.
 223

sources of a first draft of the text.215 In other words, we may be dealing with a problem of

dates, and with a tendency within Rimbaldian criticism to (rightly) read texts produced in

the fall of 1870 as increasingly explicit acts of symbolic and political engagement. It is

not unimaginable that the “Dormeur” started out as a rejection of war, only to be

redrafted by its author to reflect the need to defend the values of a fragile Republic

assailed from all sides by its enemies. Absent the discovery of an earlier manuscript of

the sonnet, these reflections will have to remain, unfortunately, rather in the domain of

the speculative.

To come back round to our concluding interrogation, let us consider the reading

of the “Domeur” qua Christic figure in Jean-François Laurent, Jean-Pierre Bobillot, and

Steve Murphy. For these three specialists of Rimbaud’s work, the signified of the

“Dormeur” is to be located in a Christological signifier positing the young soldier as a

sacrifice upon the altar of the even younger Republic. This heuristic is bolstered by a

variety of interpretative approaches ranging from the ekphrastic (i.e., the holes in the

right side of the soldier refer to the Roman soldier who pierced the right flank of Christ

on the cross as recounted in the gospel of St. John);216 the etymological (i.e., glaieuls, or,

gladiolas, are, as we mentioned earlier, literally small-swords, the type used by gladiators

in the arena, for example); and the botanical (cressons are a cruciform plant).217 In

aggregate, their interpretations constitute undeniably compelling readings of the political

valence of a Christological metaphor that links the figure of Christ and, in some senses

215
Murphy’s philological work on dating Rimbaud’s poems from this period (and in general) are much
more reliable. He proposes a date that is more firmly in the autumn of 1870, situated in October, though he
leaves open the possibility of a text written as a critique of the Napoleonic adventure in the late summer.
See his edition of Rimbaud’s Oeuvres complètes, t. I, op. cit., pp. 297-8.
216
Jean-François Laurent, art. cit., p. 22.
217
See, respectively, Jean-François Laurent, ibid., and Steve Murphy, op. cit.
 224

“Christians” taken as a community of believers, to revolutionary politics and indeed in

once instance to the Commune itself (cf., our chapter on the poem “Paris,” infra).

However, we might do well to interrogate the nature of these arguments in the

light of what “Christ’s sacrifice” may be said to represent on both a doxological and a

more speculative level in order to tease out its shared structure with belief in the political

and revolutionary sense. In this respect, let us take the example of René Girard’s work on

violence and sacrifice, for these are clearly two major aspects not only of the Passion of

the Christ, but indeed of the text we’ve been grappling with. For Girard, the moment of

sacrificial violence corresponds to a unique suspension of the Law, a moment of

exception within the cosmology and the community whose aim is to deflect the inherent

violence of the community onto a more or less “acceptable” victim who thus serves as a

kind of occasion for consolidating the community around/on the body sacrificed to the

Gods (or some other such Master-Figure on behalf of whom ceremonial sacrifice is

performed).218

As Girard underscores, with the crucifixion, the logic of (human?) sacrifice is

dismantled, its violence is “demystified”; and indeed one is almost tempted to say the

focalization of sacrifice shifts dramatically with the episode of the crucifixion. It shifts to

the degree that with Christianity the sacrificial exception fades out altogether because

sins are redeemed by the sacrifice of God “become man”. Indeed, the agent staging the

sacrifice, the point of view from which the sacrifice is in fact imagined or imitated, is no

longer that of the community, but precisely that (impossible point of view of radical

alterity) of the victim. To the degree that Christianity will insist on the innocence of

218
Cf., René Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris : Grasset, 1972) ; Things Hidden since the Foundation of
the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 103-4.
 225

victims of unjustifiable violence, Girard will argue, Christianity irrevocably deprives

sacrifice, if not indeed, paradoxically, religion itself, of any stabilizing function in

society:

Tel un cheval de Troie, il entre dans le château millénaire des religions naturelles et le
vide de l’intérieur, en empruntant à celles-ci leur langage et leur symbolique, mais en
renversant complètement leur signification, en démystifiant toute la violence sur laquelle
elles avaient été érigées.219

In a similar vein, Slavoj Žižek has argued that the real lesson of the encounter with the

traumatic Real (say, in the case of Christianity, of the impossible death of god himself on

the cross) is, on the one hand, that of a dramatic rupture, a skandalon, within the

symbolic fabric of the subject’s existence.220 The other lesson, is that of the stark

impossibility of seeking refuge in a secret, higher meaning governed and guaranteed by a

transcendental narrative or Master-Figure that is capable of saving “meaning” from an

encounter with the “brutal reality of historical catastrophes”221 and of the radically finite

nature of human existence. In this last respect, Žižek’s take on the death of God offers us

a novel way of reading Rimbaud’s “Dormeur” – as a pure act of political atheism and

poetic materialism.

The absence of a transcendent cause, or higher meaning does not deprive us of the

ability to act, to make engagements. If anything, it makes them all the more imperative.

Indeed, the theoretical paradox or dilemma in Christianity resides in the very narrative

propositions in which the “truth” about the sacred is related in the event of the Passion: is

219
René Girard, Antonello P., Castro Rocha, Les Origines de la culture (Paris: Hachette, 2006), p. 10.
220
From this perspective, we might argue that there is some small irony in the celebration of Satan in the
writings of the two most important anarchists in mid-nineteenth-century France: Proudhon and Baudelaire
(the former writing, in his De la justice, that only Satan kept the universe from being absurd). Indeed, from
within a certain Pauline reading of the coming of Christ, the greatest opposition to the sym-bolic, the
unified order of dominations, is not the dia-bolic Satan, but Christ himself. See also, Daniel Colson, Petit
lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme: de Proudhon à Deleuze (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001), pp. 75-6.
221
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), p. 181.
 226

God responsible for the death of man, or is the human community acting out in displaced

form the inaugural ur-ritual of every religion (i.e., sacrifice in the Freudian sense of

Totem and Taboo or Moses, or indeed in Girard’s sense as the literal “hidden thing [ding]

of the foundation of the world”)? Can the idea of a victory over death (or history) really

be believed, or must it be believed because of its patent, utopic, impossible absurdity,

etc.? Radical “absence” (to borrow Dominick LaCapra’s term), whether in the religious

sense of the death of God on the cross or in the political sense of a crazy wager that,

despite everything, one’s commitment to a collective and to an ideal is worth making and

thus constitutes its own form of categorical imperative: absence intersecting with “faith”

makes desperately unavoidable political engagement and ethical decisions that engage the

subject on the level of its very being, that is, for which it alone is responsible. As Žižek

puts it, glossing Chesterton, the words “he was made man” point precisely to the absence

of a “transcendent position” in the Universe “pulling the strings”; in these words, God is

“thrown into” creation, and “even dies,” leaving us “only the terrible burden of

freedom.”222 Of course, the philosopher to whom Žižek returns in his own theorization of

radical politics as the kind of subjective engagement matched only by the Tertullian

axiom credo quia absurdum est, is Kierkegaard. Indeed, as William McDonald puts it,

Christian faith, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of learning dogma by rote. It is a matter
of the individual repeatedly renewing his/her passionate subjective relationship to an
object which can never be known, but only believed in. This belief is offensive to reason,
since it only exists in the face of the absurd (the paradox of the eternal, immortal, infinite
God being incarnated in time as a finite mortal).223

Thus, as Kierkegaard insists, there’s no epistemological proposition for deducing,

extrapolating, demonstrating or guaranteeing, the existence of God. This is indeed why,

222
Ibid., p. 185.
223
William McDonald, "Søren Kierkegaard,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/kierkegaard/>.
Last consulted on 02/01/2011.
 227

for the Danish philosopher, belief belongs to the domain of what he calls the “absolute

paradox”.224 What is required is an act of belief, a Pascalian pari taking the form of an

insane wager placing faith in what, in a given socio-political and discursive

configuration, paradoxically passes for impossible, such as the resurrection of the dead,

or, mutatis mutandis, the victory of Revolution over a given society’s present injustices.

In this sense, as Žižek argues, the Christian religion is at base ethically,

politically, and cosmologically deeply disruptive. It upends the coherent, organic totality

of the pagan cosmos, its “Great Chain of Being” (of which Hugo was so fond) with its

archepolitical socio-discursive traditions that naturalize situations of domination.225 What

the death of Christ represents, then, is the emergence of not only the anxiety that

accompanies the void in human knowledge (i.e., the impossibility of knowing if one’s

choices, actions, beliefs are correct), but crucially the freedom to act, chose and believe in

a manner that unsettles the peaceful seamlessness of the given order of things despite the

gap between finite reason and the infinite agency of the Divine. To cite Kierkegaard once

more, this leap, this act of engagement that places the subject’s being in question without

any metaphysico-epistemological security may not only produce anxiety, it also produces

something like agency: “this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a

contribution of mine. Must not this also be taken into account, this little moment, brief as

224
“And how does God's existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach
of continuity? Or do we have an analogy to the behavior of the little Cartesian dolls? As soon as I let go of
the doll it stands on its head. As soon as I let it go, I must therefore let it go. So also with the proof. As long
as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no
other reason that that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there.”
Johannes Climacus (aka, Søren Kierkegaard), Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987), p. 42. One should obviously also refer, when it comes to the question of the anxiety provoked
by the leap of faith, to Kierkegaard’s prototypical “knight of faith” from “Fear and Trembling”: Abraham.
225
For a problematization of Plato’s archepolitics, the emblem of which is the myth of the three metals and
the three races of men, see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, op. cit.
 228

it may be, it need not be long, for it is a leap.”226 Thus, mobilizing Kierkegaard in his

analysis of what he calls the “Truth” of emancipatory and revolutionary politics, Žižek

argues that the Christian believer is the first figure that is revolutionary in a sense that is

“eminently modern (…): true religion is a crazy wager on the Impossible we have to

make once we lose support in tradition.”227

In sum, Laurent, Bobillot, and other readers of Rimbaud’s “Dormeur” have been

quite right to underline this Christological value of the sleeper, even if they have not

entirely articulated the extent to which the stakes of such a reading are truly radical. In

essence, an engagement is no doubt being made, but it is perhaps of the kind that is more

in line with the properly Christian act of faith/wager without any guarantee of success or

support in tradition or nature. Rimbaud’s “Dormeur” makes a properly revolutionary

wager on success despite the very real confrontation with radical loss, with the real

possibility that one’s engagement may lead to nothing, with the real of history and its

long string of stinging revolutionary defeats in the nineteenth century. We could say that

the “Dormeur” contains elements of an utter horror faced with the violence of the present

and of culture, but that, faced with such horror, the solution is to double-down on one’s

wager. For if there is a promise of resurrection in this poem, it is not a literal, or even a

mystical, one; it is a resurrection that has nothing to do with the phenomenal singularity

of the soldier as such, and everything to do with the universal idea, or event, that is em-

bodied in his fragility, his exposure. If anything is to be resurrected, it is not the soldier

whose blood guarantees the future survival of the Nation/Fatherland, but, as we shall see

in the next chapter, the past itself. What is perhaps regenerated here is not the

226
Søren Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 43.
227
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, op.cit., p. 115.
 229

particularity of a French race at war to protect its imagined cultural, racial, or territorial

integrity, but the symbolic universality of the French Revolution, the possibility of an

impossible rupture within history that changes the stories we tell by giving a voice to the

voiceless. Thus this nameless, faceless soldier, if he is the figure of anything, is the

paradoxically anti-heroic hero of an anonymous violence that questions the cultural and

ethical contours of nineteenth-century “Man,” perhaps calling for something new,

something revolutionary to take its place.

 230

The Infantile Community: Writing Resistance and Memory in the

Aftermath of the Commune

I. The Book of Laughter and Remembering

It seems as though for quite some time Rimbaud’s zuteries, that is, his 21-odd

contributions to the collection of parodic and collective writing experiments known as the

Album zutique that were first “discovered” in the 1920s,1 have suffered from something

like a case of critical appendicitis.2 When they weren’t simply excised from the earlier

editions of the Oeuvres complètes as so many textual vestigial organs, as useless or even

perverse supplements that risked poisoning the organic whole of the rimbaldian corpus,3

they were relegated to the benign exile of the appendix, as so many infantile curiosities of

a poet on the path (yet not quite yet there) to genius. For decades since they first

resurfaced in the mid-twentieth century, Rimbaud’s zuteries have been a poetic enigma, a

kind of illegible heterology that resisted coherent assimilation into the totality of the

oeuvre. Indeed, the initial, and in some respects continuing reception of the zutique texts

is best expressed by Marcel Ruff, writing that the poems contained in the Album zutique:

1
The first of such texts to be discovered was the “Sonnet du trou du cul,” which had been circulating under
the table amongst amateurs of libertine literature for a number of decades and had for years been
considered too obscene to publish amongst either Rimbaud or Verlaine’s collected works. Pascal Pia points
out that this was done for ideological as much for hagiographical reasons: the Mercure de France had
adopted an implicit rule that it would not publish any texts by Rimbaud that Claudel (whose interest was in
promoting a version of Rimbaud qua mystic Christian) would not approve of. The Album itself was
“discovered” in 1936. Graham Robb, Rimbaud, A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000), p.
137; Pascal Pia, “Introduction,” L’Album zutique, Pascal Pia, ed. (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962), p. 11.
2
I borrow this metaphor from John Mowitt’s Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1992), p. 9.
3
Such was the case, for instance, of the first authoritative edition of the O.C., edited by Suzanne Bernard.
See, Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres Complètes, Suzanne Bernard, ed. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1961).
 231

[n]e sont que gamineries et calembredaines (…).Il est légitime qu’elles soient reproduites
dans les éditions des Œuvres complètes, où elles figurent généralement à part, en
appendice. Il ne nous semble pas que leur présence soit nécessaire ni utile pour
quiconque veut étudier l’évolution de la poétique de Rimbaud.4

A reigning philological doxa held until quite recently that the zuteries were to be

taken as extraneous material useless for understanding Rimbaud’s oeuvre, as scatological

kid’s stuff, obscene child’s play. No doubt due to the dearth of scholarship surrounding

the texts that Rimbaud contributed to the Album, there are now an increasing number of

exceptions to this critical neglect, not least amongst which we find the works of Seth

Whidden, Steve Murphy, and Yves Reboul. Each of them has done invaluable work in

drawing our attention to the theoretical importance of the use of parody as a mode of

intertextuality that subverts the notion of the “proper,” and the stability of the signifier –

critical gestures compounded and complemented by the various projects of collective and

collaborative writing in the nineteenth century.5

Nevertheless, precisely why these provocative texts have been the subject of such

an acute case of “appendicitis” for so long is a question, along with those of parody,

language, community, and memory, with which we will engage over the course of the

present chapter. Such “editorial marginalization” has been but the latest iteration of a

kind of tacit tradition in selectively editing Rimbaud’s work, a tradition that (rightly)

folds (some of) the poet’s texts into the French literary canon, but does so at the expense

4
Marcel Ruff, ed., Athur Rimbaud, Poésies (Paris: Nizet, 1978), p. 14. Cited in Seth Whidden, “Sur la
parodie en expansion du zutiste Rimbaud: le contraste entre ‘Vu à Rome’ et ‘Fête Galante,” La Poésie
jubilatoire: Rimbaud, Verlaine, et l’Album zutique, Seth Whidden, ed. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011), p.
255.
5
If Murphy has done the best exegetical work on the uses of parody in Rimbaud (see his, Rimbaud et la
ménagerie impériale), Whidden has of late been dedicated to theorizing the various practices of literary and
artistic collaboration in nineteenth-century French literature. The collection of essays he edited focusing on
the Album zutique (c.f. supra) is a first, and long overdue, study of the various members and texts in the
Album zutique that have been even more neglected than those of Verlaine and Rimbaud. See Seth Whidden,
ed., Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen
(Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009). Bertrand Teyssèdre has also recently published a study of
Rimbaud’s zuteries entitled Arthur Rimbaud et le foutoire zutique (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2011).
 232

of the context in which they were written, thus somewhat successfully rendering silent,

unconscious (and hence infans), the political and esthetic revolt that is inscribed in the

poet’s early works (circa, 1870-71).6 In a word, the methodical marginalization and

under-theorization of the works from the année terrible, and especially those that can be

found in the Album zutique has much more to do with the intricately subversive nature of

the political and erotic content of many of these texts, and with the theory of language

and community that they advance, than with their putative immaturity. Indeed, if Didier

Nourrisson’s recent article on the reception of the Commune in the history classes of the

Republic is any indication,7 we could take this theoretical observation a step further and

affirm that there exists a strange parallel, or corollary, between the historical patterns of

forgetting and remembering the Paris Commune and these texts by Rimbaud, if not of his

early works in verse in general. In both cases, there is first a repression of the event from

a larger narrative cadre, then a process of selectively remembering it.

The infantile qualifying the community in the title of this chapter is thus slightly

tongue-in-cheek. Rather than “immature,” undeveloped, voiceless works, we ought to

emphasize the etymological sense of the infantile, and understand these texts as referring

to subjectivities who are posited as having a fundamental lack at the heart of their being,

a lack of voice, logos. We must understand the works in the Album zutique as symbolic

6
This tradition was inaugurated by Rimbaud’s sister, Isabelle, and later Paul Claudel, whose choice of texts
was always done with an eye towards revising history, as well as Paul Verlaine at the moment in the 1880s
when he was attempting to rehabilitate his image and make a literary “come-back” – seeking, in other
words, to cultivate a kind of oblivion around his disastrous marriage, his love-affair with Rimbaud, and his
involvement in the Commune. See Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale (Lyon: Presses
Universitaires de Lyon, 1991), and the more recent “Une saison en purgatoire (petite dose d’anti-mythes
rimbaldogiques),” in Lectures des Poésies et d’Une saison en enfer de Rimbaud, Steve Murphy, ed.
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 333-44).
7
Didier Nourrisson, “La Commune enseignée au cours des Républiques: une affaire d’images,” in La
Commune de 1871: l’événement, les hommes, et la mémoire – actes du colloque des 15-16 mars, 2003,
Claude Latta, ed. (St. Etienne: Presses Universitaires de St. Etienne, 2004), pp. 337-58.
 233

acts enunciating a condition of equality. For as Jacques Rancière reminds us, the very

gesture of the political in Aristotle turns around a distinction and a paradox. In Aristotle’s

Politics, we find the well-known distinction between mere noise and speech, between the

disarticulated noise of what we are theorizing as the infans (children, women, slaves) and

the logos of those who have a title to participate as equals in the affairs of the public

sphere.8 A paradox arises, as Rancière notes, when we consider that, in order to explain

to a subject that their position of social exclusion is founded on a natural order, one has

logically already admitted that they have reason enough to comprehend this hierarchy. It

is thus that the very justification of domination simultaneously admits (a) the radical

“equality [based on speech] of anyone and everyone” which “gnaws away at any natural

order”; and (b) the absence of a “natural” hierarchical order in society, the “sheer

contingency of any order”.9

We must also apprehend these texts as the inscription of a memory at a moment

when the ordre du jour was that of lex oblivionis (more on this in a moment).

Simultaneously, we can locate in the following texts critiques of what Michel Foucault

calls in his later works a “regime,” or “politics,” of truth, or, a set of social, political, and

ontological norms, practices, and relations that establish the “truth” of a certain

class/category of subjects, and with which the subject strategically negotiates in order to

constitute itself.10 The truth-regime in question, and the political and symbolic problems

that it generates, is what I have referred to in this work as the conjoining of the figures,

infans/demos, a crucial nineteenth century of the metaphor of the enfant-peuple, which, if

8
Aristotle, Politics, (New York: The Barnes and Noble Library of Essential Reading, 2005), p. 4.
9
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), pp. 15-17.
10
Michel Foucault, “L’Éthique du souci du soi comme pratique de liberté,” op. cit., p. 1537.
 234

anything, becomes significantly more pronounced and more ominous in the aftermath of

the semaine sanglante. I argue that the infans/demos is a regulating trope of nineteenth-

century political and disciplinary discourse according to which the child functions as a

kind of metonym of the politically, socially, and discursively marginalized, and,

inversely, those who are marginalized are apprehended as somehow essentially infantile.

We can locate in this gesture of infantilization one of the “founding” divisions of

logocentrism, if not of politics in the West:11 infantilization is an a priori disqualifying of

the speech of the margins as insignificant, as inarticulate meaninglessness, as mere

sound, which leads to a kind of ontologization, of class difference for example, in which

the exploited are viewed as childish, if not children to be disciplined, to be regulated.

Thus, in the following pages, we will interrogate two of the epistemologically,

ethically, and politically radical texts from the Album zutique in order to arrive at and

prone a counter-theory of Rimbaud’s work that situates them within a comprehensible

esthetico-political project. This triad constellation of the epistemic, the ethical, and the

political responds respectively to the problems posed by voicing critiques of repressively

heteromasculine gender norms, to performing a kind of archival act of remembering

something that is under great pressure to be repressed, and to holding out hope for a

community capable of re-arranging the parameters of everyday life in an egalitarian

perspective. This chapter proposes a method and model of reading similar to the first

chapter of this dissertation. In it, we will take one of the more experimental “sonnets”

that Rimbaud wrote in the Album, and show how the text can be coherently understood as

11
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, op. cit.
 235

an intervention into its own, post-semaine sanglante historical context that embodies and

re-appropriates the space of the city for a lost community.12

In order to read the sonnet “Paris” as a symbolic act of resistance to the forgetting

of the Commune, we will first attempt to situate the artists who formed the infamous

Cercle zutique within the upheavals of post-(civil) war Parisian politics and literature in

contrast to the group of poets more closely associated with the Parnassian “movement”.

In passing, we will have time to consider Rimbaud’s peculiar situation in Paris in

September, 1871, as a kind critical “work-of-the-self,” to borrow Foucault’s term.13 This

“work-of-the-self” constitutes an ascetics/esthetics of the self that, if looked at correctly,

begins to resemble something less like a desire to épater les bourgeois, and more like a

wholesale refusal of early Third Republic norms concerning the body and desire. We will

then offer a theory of parody and collective writing as essentially Communard, if not

communist, modes of writing that seek to preserve the memory of the Commune from the

supplementary violence of forgetting, of simultaneously archiving the event of the

Commune and resisting the neutralization of its ideals of equality and democracy. I claim

that the intersection of the ethos, esthetics, and politics that can be found in “Paris” point

towards the poet’s continuing engagement with and adherence to the ideas and ideals of

the Paris Commune rather than to a supposed abandonment of the political in favor of an

12
As Seth Whidden reminds us, the key feature of “writerly communities” in the nineteenth century is that
they attempt to construct “substitutes for (…) formal collectivities that have disappeared.” Seth Whidden,
“Introduction: On Collaboration,” in Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, op.
cit., p. 11. My emphasis.
13
Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, 2: le courage de la vérité (1983-1984) (Paris:
Seuil, 2009). See also, ibid. “Qu’est-ce que les lumières ?,” “Michel Foucault, une interview : sexe,
pouvoir, et la politique de l’identité,” L’éthique du souci du soi comme pratique de la liberté,” “Une
esthétique de l’existence,” and “Vérité, pouvoir et soi,” in Dits et écrits 2, 1976-1988 (Paris: Gallimard,
2001), pp. 1381-1403, 1527-65, 1596-1602. See also Judith Butler “What Is Critique? An Essay on
Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Judith Butler Reader, Sara Salin and Judith Butler, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell
Press, 2004), pp. 302-22
 236

increasingly impenetrable stylistics.14 In the final section of this chapter, we will mobilize

our philological, historical, and critical findings in order to offer a theoretically,

politically, and genealogically informed reading of a sonnet that Rimbaud and Verlaine

wrote together entitled, “Le Sonnet du trou du cul”. With that in mind, let us now turn to

the historical context of Paris and France in the immediate aftermath of the Commune’s

repression, and to the problem of memory.

II. Lex Oblivionis: or, Don’t Forget to Remember to Forget

Literary critics and biographers know an awful lot about the details of Arthur

Rimbaud’s decisive trip to Paris in1871. The young poet had been to the capital at least

twice prior to his arrival there in late September of 1871. The previous year, at

approximately the same time, he’d been arrested at the Gare de l’Est for travelling

without a ticket. By all accounts, he had also managed to walk there – and back to

Charleville – sometime around the month February, 1871. Things could not have been

more different, however, in the autumn of 1871, as much for the young poet as for the

capital itself. This time, Rimbaud headed to Paris on the personal invitation of Paul

Verlaine, a young poet himself on the avant-garde margins of Parnassus to whom he had

sent some choice and, with regards to the particular semiotics of nineteenth-century

homoeroticism, discretely seductive,15 poems earlier that year. Though the letter

Rimbaud sent to Verlaine was either lost or destroyed, Verlaine remarked years later that

among the poems he claimed to have first received from Rimbaud were
14
Éric Marty, “Rimbaud et l’adieu au politique,” Cahiers de la littérature française (Paris : Harmattan,
2005), pp. 63-79.
15
Paul Verlaine, Les Fêtes galantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), pp. 133,146. Laure Murat, La Loi du genre:
une histoire culturelle du ‘troisième sexe’ (Paris: Fayard, 2006) ; William Peniston, Pederasts and Others:
Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004);
Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: W.W.
Norton and Co., 2005).
 237

“Accroupissements,” “Les effarés,” “Les poètes de sept ans”. In each of these texts,

themes of exposed buttocks and sites saturated with homosocial desire such as

seminaries, sites sure to appeal to Verlaine’s anti-clericalism, are prevalent, linking the

sexual to the political and the poetic. In the same letter, Rimbaud also purportedly

promised to be “moins gênant qu’un Zanetto.” This last (unfulfilled to say the least)

promise refers to Sarah Bernhardt’s first major stage success in 1869 (in François

Coppée’s Le Passant), in which a transvestite Bernhardt plays a young boy. Hence we

have the first trace of a distinctly literary, and indeed poetic, seduction that we shall

explore at greater length in the final section of this chapter.16

In September of 1871, the sheer, topographical materiality of Paris probably

looked like something close to the apocalypse had recently taken place there. In many

regards, such a claim is not a hyperbolic stretch of rhetoric. The capital of the nineteenth

century had recently gone through two protracted and devastating sieges, which had the

effect of first emptying the zoos17 and then, significantly for the events that were to

follow, the beaux-quartiers of their inhabitants. These sieges (September-January 1870,

then March-June 1871) were punctuated by intense bombardments, ultimately reaching a

crescendo in a short but inconceivably savage civil war that had reduced many of its

16
As Steve Murphy suggests, Rimbaud may have been using his own poetry to imply both a libidinal and
an esthetic connection to Verlaine before they had even met. “Les Effarés,” for example, is written in a
typically (cf., Les Fêtes galantes) bisyllabic meter of octosyllables and quadrisyllables arranged in tercets
(and an explicitly verlainian feminine rhyme “culotte/tremblotte”), as a sort of knowing wink expressing
Rimbaud’s admiration for Verlaine’s oeuvre. Steve Murphy, Stratégies de Rimbaud (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2009), pp. 85-93.
17
The last foodstuffs shipped into Paris were in late September of 1870. With actual supplies of food for a
major metropolitan population being able to last only a month or slightly more, the inhabitants of Paris (or,
at least, those who could afford to frequent the cafés of the capital) quickly became habituated to seeing
consommé de cheval on the menus, alongside rats and cats. The two prize elephants, Castor and Pollux, of
the Jardin des Plantes met their demise in December. For the impoverished, bread adulterated with sawdust
and, eventually, the bones of the dead from the catacombs and cheap wine became the rudimentary caloric
means of keeping body and soul together.
 238

neighborhoods to rubble and its population to a degree that is infamously difficult to

assess.18 Indeed, it might have seemed to the contemporary observer that something like

those post-romantic fantasies envisioning the present-day Paris from the future anterior

perspective of its ruin, from the position, that is, of a pure, disembodied gaze situated in a

post-human future,19 had somehow managed to leap out from the silent confines of the

page and blot reality with an intrusion of the “real” of class warfare. Landmarks, from the

Hôtel de Ville to the Colonne Vendôme, were burnt or toppled, les grands boulevards and

apartment buildings had been transformed into battlefields, and anodyne street corners

metamorphosed into ad hoc stations for summary, mass executions for anyone who had a

bruise on their shoulder, soot on their hands, grey hair or was under the age of sixteen.20

In a word, anyone who simply looked like they might have sympathies for the Commune

was lucky if they were merely arrested in May of 1871. In the autumn, the landscape of

the city of lights was still visibly blighted with the literal and imaginary pockmarks of

what we would no doubt call today a war-crime.

But what do we know of the political climate of the time, or the circles in which

the poet travelled in the fall of 1871 and early winter of 1872? The cultural, historical,

and political context of post-Commune Paris gives us some idea of the context in which

18
See, Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris 1871 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Jacques
Rougerie, La Commune de 1871 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Ibid., Procès des
Communards (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); Prosper Lissagary, Histoire de la Commune de Paris (Paris :
Librairie E. Dentu, 1896) ; David Schafer, The Paris Commune : French Politics, Culture, and Society at
the Crossroads of the Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism (Houndsmill, England:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005).
19
Cf., Maxime du Camp’s apocalyptic musings from Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la
seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris : Hachette, 1869).
20
The ghoulishly calculated logic of this order, given by General Gallifet, was that anyone with grey hair
amongst the communards was probably a quarante-huitard and so, for the general biopolitical good, ought
to be exterminated. For children under sixteen, a similar logic was applied. As sixteen was the legal age of
conscription, being caught under this threshold meant that you were on the barricades out of ideological
sympathy, and would be shot in order to prevent future uprisings.
 239

the poems of the Album zutique were written.21 First of all, though it may seem somewhat

self-evident as far as propositions go, there’s obviously a very real difference separating

warfare amongst Nation-States from civil war. This is true as much for the ways

“regular” and “civil” wars are waged as for the way they are discussed, remembered, and

integrated into the historical narrative of a Nation. In the fall of 1871, as in the aftermath

of many civil wars, an implicit and explicitly enforced lex oblivionis, a law of forgetting,

was the order of the day. The logic of this law of forgetting ran as follows: the only way

to move forward and rebuild the “Nation” was to consign the recent traumas that had rent

it asunder to oblivion. Or, rather than “tearing” apart the organic community, what had

been revealed by the working-class revolution in Paris was the community’s fundamental

split, the non-coincidence of society to the sum of its parts. For, as Nicole Loraux points

out in her study of civil war in ancient Greece,22 to merely talk about the violent split of

the city is to symbolically reactualize that traumatic gap, to reveal that the community is

not wholly accounted for, in a gesture that undoes the temporal difference between past

and present. Memory reintroduces division, along with its phantasmatic difference within

the city, thereby virtually reigniting the civil war.23

The irony of course is that this paradoxal fantasy, or law of remembering to

forget, follows precisely the kind of fetishistic logic of disavowal that guarantees the

21
I’d like to refer to two excellent sources that have treated the subject of post-Commune political
repression: Jean-Claude Caron’s Frères de sang: la guerre civile en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: La
Chose Publique, 2009), and Robert J. Goldstein’s Censorship of Caricature in nineteenth-century France
(Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1989).
22
Nicole Loraux, La Cité divisée: l’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes (Paris: Payot, 2005).
23
Do we not see precisely this sort of compulsory amnesia at work in key periods of French history ? The
Edict of Nantes, for example, explicity states: “Défendons à tous nos sujets (…) d[e] renouveller la
mémoire [des guerres de religion],” and the 1814 charter restoring the French monarchy follows much the
same line when its authors, while lamenting the fact the it is impossible to erase the “Event” of the French
Revolution from History itself, all the same take some comfort in the idea that it’s at least possible to forbid
people from talking (or writing) about the recent European upheavals. For a more recent example, we
might turn to Rwanda. See, Jean-Claude Caron, op. cit., p. 236.
 240

return of the real in the form of cultural and mnemic symptoms. Thus, one finds a

veritable explosion of publications in diverse genres treating of the subject of the Franco-

Prussian war.24

The same cannot be said of the Commune. With the exception of Vallès and

Rimbaud, few were eager or, for that matter, able to write favorably about the Commune

until well after the amnesty of the Communards in the summer of 1880. Verlaine himself

had deep sympathies for and was actively engaged in the Commune as a press censor. We

would do well to keep in mind Verlaine’s participation in the Commune, as it’s not

impossible that he may have had a politically radicalizing influence on Rimbaud. In the

aftermath of the Commune, Verlaine made a vague attempt at writing a volume of poetry

entitled Les Vaincus (the title referring to the defeated communards). His editor,

Alphonse Lemerre, told him that he was, in essence, quite out of his mind if he thought

that such a volume were even possible to publish and that, if he had it in mind to continue

writing, he should “forget politics”.25

24
Bertrand Taithe, Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France (New
York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 2-3. See also chapter two of the present work.
25
Lemerre’s exact response was: “Supprimez deux choses dans v/ existence ; la Politique & la Jalousie &
vous serez un homme parfait.” Paul Verlaine, Correspondances générales t. I, 1857-1885, Michael
Pakenham, ed. (Paris: Fayard, 2005), p. 212. In nineteenth-century conservative political discourse, politics
and jealousy are conjoined in one figure, the socialist worker “jealous” of the bourgeoisie’s economic
success. In terms of historical accounts of the Commune, a recent article by Didier Nourrisson on the
historical representation of the Commune in the Republican school demonstrated that one must wait until
the textbooks of 1981 until you see anything like a neutral or favorable iconography or narrative of the
Commune and its agents. Prior to that, the emphasis was placed on the destruction of Paris, with students
asked during exams to produce a list of monuments burnt or otherwise destroyed by the Communards. And
yet, such temporal markers are hardly very stable. In Michel Winock’s 1986 study of political crises in
France from the Commune to May 68, he claims, in a distinctly Hugolian vein, that the most unfortunate
aspect of civil war is that its participants tend to let their emotions get the better of them. By way of
example, he cites the attempt to physically annihilate the political left in Paris by the Versaillais, and the
destruction of the expiatory chapel and of Thiers’s home as equivalent rituals of “vengence et de meurtre”.
See, Didier Nourrisson, op. cit. See also, Michel Winock, La Fièvre hexagonale: les grandes crises
politiques, 1871-1968 (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1986), p. 40.
 241

The construction and deployment of a repressive police apparatus didn’t exactly

make matters much easier. In the autumn of 1871, the city of Paris continued officially to

be in a state of siege, as it would be until 1876! Draconian censorship laws more severe

than even those of the late Second Empire were passed that would remain in place until

1881, well after, that is, the triumph of moderate republicans – les radicaux – in the lower

and upper houses in the 1876-77 elections. In the atmosphere of post-Commune political

repression, the fear amongst the military authorities governing Paris was, as R.J.

Goldstein puts it, of nothing less than “anything that might recall memories of the

dreaded Commune.”26 Thus, in June of 1871 the Thiers government reinstated Article 22

of the decree of April 1852 banning the sale of newspapers, prints, photos, or books

without first registering them with the Ministry of the Interior, which was at the time the

institution responsible for National Defense. In December of 1871, the military governor

of Paris issued a decree banning the sale of photographs, images, and emblems that might

trouble the public peace,27 eventually going on to ban all “prints which present a political

character” or that were dubious from the point of view of “morals and religion”.28

Looking forward meant ridding the national psyche of the twin maladies of democracy

and memory. It meant, in Gambetta’s words, creating a society in which the ruling

classes might put a final “pierre tumulaire de l’oubli sur les crimes et les vestiges de la

Commune.”29

26
Robert J. Goldstein, op. cit., p. 205. See also, Colette Wilson, “Memory and the Politics of Forgetting:
Paris, the Commune and the 1878 Exposition universelle,” in Journal of European Studies 35 (1), n. 1, p.
60.
27
He had in mind specifically portraits of dead or deported communards, which frankly makes one wonder
about the importance and volume of such a commerce in this period.
28
Robert J. Goldstein, op. cit., p. 205.
29
Cited in Colette Wilson, op. cit., p. 59.
 242

It is in such a context that Rimbaud scribbles down one of his first contributions

to the Album zutique, a chaotically heterometric quintil without rhymes entitled “Vieux

de la Vieille!”. Unless we count the rich, if banal, rhyme around “Mars,” we are well on

our way here to a kind of free-verse poetics:

Aux paysans de l’empereur !

A l’empereur des paysans !
Au fils de Mars,
Au glorieux 18 Mars !
Où le ciel d’Eugénie a béni les entrailles !30

Such a text clearly would have posed a couple of problems from the point of view

of “memory, morals, and religion” in late 1871. Its title, furthermore, suggests that the

poem is a parody of Théophile Gautier, one of the foundational figures of Parnassian

poetics. Indeed, in Gautier’s Émaux et camées we can find a poem of exactly the same

name, minus what we must take as a sardonic exclamation point. Gautier’s poem is one

that we might consider as a masterpiece of the return of the repressed, elliptically

recounting the coup d’état of 1851 in the guise of a ghoulish spectacle of three Colonel

Chabert-like veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns that descend into the streets of Paris

on 15 December 1851 to celebrate the “grand retour” of the Empire.31

In Rimbaud’s parody, we find a deliciously succinct, and much more overt than

the one in Gautier’s hypotext, political critique in the form of the chiasmatic apostrophes

of the first two verses. In their way, the poem’s attaque echoes not only Marx’s analysis

30
Arthur Rimbaud, “Vieux de la vieille !,” in O.C., op. cit., p. 176. See also Steve Murphy’s discussion of
this text and its Parnassian hypotext in his “Détours et détournements: Rimbaud et le parodique,” in Textes
et contextes d’une révolution poétique, S. Murphy, ed., Parade sauvage: Colloque 4 (13-15 Sep., 2002),
2004, pp. 114-115. See also his Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op. cit., pp. 36-42. See also Bertrand
Teyssèdre’s “Essai de chronologie des textes de Rimbaud dans l’Album zutique,” in La Poésie jubilatoire,
op. cit., pp. 36-7.
31
Théophile Gautier, Émaux et camées (Paris: Charpentier et cie., 1872), pp. 75-77.
 243

of the role of the rural populations in Napoléon III’s ascent to power,32 they are a more or

less direct citation of a fairly common discourse amongst (what was left of) the political

left in the post-Commune period, namely, that the Commune had been crushed by the

ruraux, the peasants of the provinces who had elected monarchists to majorities in the

Assemblée, and from whose ranks the soldiers who drowned the Commune in a blood-

bath had been largely recruited. In fact, the “poem” is very nearly a highly condensed

historiography of the Empires of France: the title refers to soldiers from the Napoleonic

wars (i.e., of Napoléon I), the ideological, political, and historical grandeur of which is

satirically contrasted to the Emperor presiding over a bunch of country bumpkins. First as

tragedy, then as farce, so to speak.33 This farcically ironic logic collides with the

“miracle” of the poem’s excipit – that is, the birth of a son to Napoléon III in the late

1850s, supposedly cementing the Napoleonic dynasty’s place in French politics. It is

notable, for instance, that the last line is an indirectly transgressive gloss on the Catholic

Ave Maria, the fruit of whose womb is the Savior of Humanity, the Christ.34

32
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 2004), p.
36. Still, as David Harvey has pointed out, the political and class situation in the provinces was, for a
variety of reasons covering the gamut from a desire to preserve a degree of local autonomy (i.e., resisting
the increasing centralization of economic and political power in the capital) to real ideological commitment
to the Republic, much more complicated than even Marx was able to perceive. Of course, in 1848, as in
1871, the vast majority of soldiers who crushed the working-class Parisian uprising were drawn from the
provinces. However, resistance to the coup d’état was in many respects even greater in the provinces than
in Paris (which may, after all, be logical), especially in the center and east of France – a fact which didn’t
fail to surprise the organizers of the coup d’état. Furthermore, many of the procès verbaux of those
arrested in the aftermath of the coup were translated into French from local patois, such as franc-comtois,
suggesting (pace Grégoire) that by mid-century use of the French language and a sense of belonging to the
“imaginary community” were by no means co-determinate. David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity
(New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 276-80.
33
Karl Marx, op. cit..
34
Murphy points out that Rimbaud’s reference to the glorious 18 Mars may function as a kind of malicious
elision of the imperial prince’s birthday which was the 16 mars. He also points the reader to another text by
Gautier (“Nativité”) which explicitly draws out a rather mawkish allegorical connection between the birth
of Napoléon and Eugénie’s son and the birth of Jesus Christ. Steve Murphy, op. cit., p. 35.
 244

Still more interesting are the lines at the heart of the poem: “Au fils de Mars,/ Au

glorieux 18 Mars!”. They are the only lines of the text that are in any kind of distinct,

contiguous syntactical relation. Furthermore, Rimbaud cultivates a polysemic ambiguity

around the sememe “Mars,” to which he draws our attention graphically by italicizing the

second occurrence of the word. In the Roman cosmology, “Mars” is the mythical god of

war. We might read, then, “Mars” as a metaphorical, and again highly ironic, vocative

referring metonymically to the erstwhile emperor, Napoléon III.35 “Mars” was, after all,

the tutelary god of the Imperial city, Rome. Indeed, Napoléon III not only sought to

mythologize himself much in the vein of his more illustrious uncle, but also periodically

sought to stabilize his regime and stifle dissent through increasingly disastrous foreign

military adventures in Mexico, Africa, and eventually Europe. However, “Mars” is also a

month of the Christian calendar. Rimbaud reinforces a mensual reading of the sememe by

giving us a precise, and highly valorized, date: the glorious 18th of March. Given this

polysemic, or antanaclastic, play around the noun “mars,” and without seeking to

immobilize any one reading at the expense of another, it is just as possible to read these

lines as referring not to the emperor who brought his own house tumbling down upon

him, but rather to a very different war. The historical referent of “Vieux de la vieille!” is

not the war that put an end to the Empire, but the one that tried to put an end to empires

as such. For the “glorious 18th of March” is the very day that the spark that triggered the

Commune went off on the hills of Montmartre. Perhaps, then, Mars’s children are simply

35
Indeed, a similar periphrasis is employed by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, leading one to suspect that
such a turn of phrase may not in fact have been a simple cliché (a proposition not without importance for a
parodic reading of the Second Empire’s self-propagandizing in this poem by Rimbaud). In the jardins de
Luxembourg, where he has been following Cosette and Jean Valjean, Marius notices an elderly soldier
missing an arm and a leg, and wonders to himself why this débris de Mars appears to be happy. See Victor
Hugo, Les Misérables, t. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 898.
 245

the ordinary women, children, and men (and they were mostly women on their way to the

markets at Les Halles to begin with) who spontaneously rose up in the early morning

hours of March to defend the working-class cannons of Paris, and with them, the

Republic itself.36

III. Le Cercle Zutique: or, How to Make Enemies and Alienate People

“Vieux de la vieille!” counts amongst the first texts that Rimbaud writes in the

company of his new friends and fellow writers at the Hôtel des Étrangers.37 This “poem”

indeed shares a number of characteristics with the zutist sonnet “Paris,” namely the

aggressive use of punctuation, the subversion of Catholic dogma, and submerged

references to the complicity of Church and State in crushing political opposition. As

such, both “Vieux de la Vieille!” and “Paris” can be taken as emblems of the political,

ethical, and esthetic of the literary collective known as the Cercle zutique.

Perhaps the best way of thinking theoretically about the Cercle zutique is as a

melancholic trace, or encryption, of the loss of the “community of those without

community,” a loss which, in the aftermath of the semaine sanglante, had been officially

disavowed, refused recognition, as an ungrievable non-event. After all, who in their right

mind mourns the loss of a threat to civilization as such at the hands of a gang of alcoholic

and opportunistic madmen, a species of subhuman “bêtes féroces” and “monstres

36
Amongst other ideals that the Commune eventually came to represent, it represented its own mission to
itself and to the rest of France first and foremost as that of forming a bulwark against the monarchist and
ultra-reactionary majorities that were elected to the French parliament on February 8th of 1871 and the
French Republic that was at least theoretically proclaimed on the 4th of September 1870.
37
The club held its “meetings” in the entresol of this hotel, which still stands (under the decidedly less
evocative title of…Best Western) at the corner of the rue Racine and the Boulevard St. Michel, just across
from a massive used book store.
 246

dégénérés”?38 At work in such representations is what Judith Butler has described as a

cultural regulation and distribution of grief that dehumanizes the victims of violence, that

places a discursive limit on the kinds of life and ideas that can be apprehended in the

cultural and political framework as constituting “grievable lives,” as lives and ideas

whose loss can be acknowledged collectively. The Cercle zutique is, then, a kind of

method of maintaining, through writing, a community whose loss has been radically

negated. For what is at work in such refusals to recognize the loss of the other, or the

other’s loss, is not so much an object. What is at stake is not so much a negation that can

be articulated as “you haven’t lost this,” but rather the more fundamental negation of the

entire predicative relation that binds us, through mourning and remembering, to the

common symbolic fabric of humanity: there is no loss. The writing experiments that are

contained in the Album zutique are both the attempt to produce a space of speech where

what has been lost can be articulated, remembered, and in some sense repeated, and a

kind of theory of language to the extent that most of them are parodies, written

collectively, and are run through with references to recent events and well-known figures

of the era – that is, they are a synchronic image of language that nonetheless makes a

gesture towards history, towards diachrony. They are texts that unsettle the dominant,

38
For a much larger catalogue of such invective, see Paul Lidksy’s study of the reaction to the Commune
amongst the French literati, wherein one can find the following and by no means exceptional description of
the communards by Théophile Gautier: “(…) wild animals, stinking beasts, venomous beasts, all the
refractory perversities that civilization has been unable to tame, those who love blood, (…) who delight in
thievery (…), a population from another world, unused to daylight”. See Paul Lidksy, Les Écrivains contre
la Commune (Paris: La découverte, 1999), pp. 40 89-127, 153-9. To give the reader a somewhat condensed
view of just what stakes were involved, I’d also cite the following brief passage from a decree by the
Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, published on 25 May, 1871. It stated that the government would use
every means possible to extradite from its territory “ces gens qui méritent à peine le nom d’hommes et qui
devraient être mis au ban de toutes les nations civilisées.” Portrait of the communard as werewolf, as it
were. Extraditing communards was a significant change in policy for Belgium, if we recall that Victor
Hugo sought asylum there in 1851. Cited in, Victor Hugo, Écrits politiques, Franck Laurent, ed. (Paris: La
Librairie générale Française, 2001), p. 295.
 247

Parnassian, poetic model of poetry’s timeless uselessness, and its ethos of “turning-away”

from the present.

Texts such as “Vieux de la vieille!” and “Paris” thus may be read as constituting

what Judith Butler calls “an ‘offense’ against the public [prohibition on grieving] itself

(…); an intolerable eruption within the terms of what is speakable in public”39. They are

poems that resist the supplementary symbolic violence done to memory itself, aiming at

what Lacan called the “deuxième mort,” or the effacement of the subject’s symbolic

position from reality itself.40 The very existence of the Cercle zutique points towards a

practice of remembering the voices of the dead, of those who are already radically,

undialectically infans. As a writerly collective, as a community forged around poetry, the

Cercle zutique bears the spectral trace of a lost ideal (of) community in the face of

impossible and indeed sometimes dangerous odds.

The members of the Cercle zutique were what we might colloquially call “out

there”. Now, the Cercle Zutique had been around slightly prior to Rimbaud’s arrival in

Paris. It represented a kind of fringe group of the Vilains Bonshommes, an ad hoc group

of writers affiliated with the literary revue Le Parnasse Contemporain, and more

generally with the Parnassian movement. Rimbaud would give the first known public

reading of his “Bateau ivre” at a meeting of the Vilains Bonshommes that took place in

early October in an apartment on the Place St. Sulpice at the corner of the rue Bonaparte

and the rue du Vieux-Colombier. Despite the ostensible ferocity of their name, the

gatherings of the “The Nasty Fellows” were, by some accounts, little more than

39
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Politics of Violence and Mourning (London and New York: Verso,
2004), pp. 33-7.
40
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960),
Jacques Alain-Miller, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 211, 248, 254, 260, 294-5.
 248

convenient occasions for eating a copious dinner followed by the digestif of an even more

copious poetry reading.41 If, however, the Vilains Bonshommes were a fringe of the

official Parisian literary milieu, then in the aftermath of the war and the Commune, which

interrupted the monthly dinners of the Bonshommes, a fringe of the fringe formed. As

Pascal Pia points out, we can find zutistes such as Verlaine, Rimbaud, or Charles Cros.

haunting the dinners of the Bonshommes. The reverse, however, is not true. According to

Pia, few, if any, figures from the official avant-garde of Parnasse that was the Vilains

Bonshommes could be found in the entresol of the Hôtel des Étrangers. This was, after

all, for an understandable reason: on the one hand, many of Parnasse’s foundational

figures, such as François Coppée and Leconte de Lisle, were privileged targets of the

group’s parodies. Such is especially the case for François Coppée, whom Rimbaud and

Verlaine would continue to parody in their letters well after they had left Paris (they

called these parodies, vieux Coppées). On the other hand, the vast majority of the writers

affiliated with the Parnassian movement had been deeply reticent when it came to taking

sides at the moment of the Commune, when they didn’t simply call for the massacre of

the “communeux”. Like Victor Hugo, Catulle Mendès, Maxime du Camp, and François

Coppée tended to relativize the events of the civil war, attributing the savagery of the

semaine sanglante to a corollary excess on the side of the Communards.42 This simple

41
See Verlaine’s account of these gatherings in his 1895 preface to Rimbaud’s Poésies Complètes in Les
Fêtes galantes, op. cit. p. 119.
42
It is difficult to imagine that Coppée’s opportunistically timed volume of poetry, Plus de sang, wasn’t
partially responsible for the fact that he, perhaps more than any other contemporary figure, appears as a
frequent target of zutique ire and ridicule. Lines describing the Commune as a “moment de démence” to be
forever forgotten in order to make possible a return to the old partage du sensible, with workers at their
hammers (“Vite à nos marteaux. Travaillons / Travaillons en disant: c’est un mauvais rêve”) the writer at
his table, and all the “fils de Gaule” ready to pick up a rifle and avenge the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (“Nous
irons vers le Rhin/ pour laver notre honte”) could not have failed to seem at the very least in delusionally
poor taste in the aftermath of the semaine sanglante. François Coppée, Plus de sang (Paris: Editions Al.
Lemerre, 1872), p. 311.
 249

ideological fault-line grew into a yawning chasm when documents uncovered in the

Tuileries Palace during the Commune had revealed that the Villains’s figurehead,

Leconte de Lisle, had been on the imperial payroll during the last years of Napoléon III’s

reign.43

In contrast, the zutistes were not only sympathetic to the Commune, some of

them actually worked for the Commune in minor posts (simply being associated with the

Commune in those early days entailed some risk of being arrested). Such was the case of

Verlaine, for instance, who worked, ironically enough, in the bureau de censure de la

presse from March to May 1871. As Yves Reboul reminds us, Verlaine was perhaps the

most politically subversive member of an already socially and politically marginal

group.44 Amongst the signatures in the Album, then, we can find those of Paul Verlaine,

the celebrated caricaturist André Gill, a musician-mainstay of the left bank Bohemia

named Ernest Cabaner, the painter Louis Forain, the poet Charles Cros and his brother,

Antoine who drew the magnificent proto-surrealist frontispiece to the Album, as well as

the poet Léon Valade. The latter’s collaborations with Albert Mérat, also a member of the

Cercle for a time, led Verlaine to give them the nicknames “Vérat et Malade”.45 The

zutistes were a subversive avant-garde of the Parnassian avant-garde, “une extrême

gauche beaucoup plus marquée, beaucoup plus audacieuse, et plus combative que ne

l’avait été, même à son origine, la réunion des Vilains Bonshommes.”46

In post-semaine sanglante Paris, the eponymous credo of the literary collective,

zut !, takes on the contours of a barely subdued rebellion against society. Nowadays,

43
Pascal Pia, op. cit., p. 14.
44
Yves Reboul, Rimbaud dans son temps (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2009), pp. 96-7.
45
Claude Jeancolas, Le Dictionnaire Rimbaud (Paris: Editions Balland, 1991), s.v., Cabaner, Cercle
Zutique, Cros, Forain, Gill, Valade. See also Seth Whidden, Models of Collaboration, op.cit.
46
Pascal Pia, op. cit., p. 15.
 250

“zut” seems outlandishly edulcorated and perhaps a bit childish. One can come across the

interjection in Le Petit Nicolas, for example, and it won’t raise any eyebrows. In 1871,

however, according to the Littré and to Delvau’s Dictionnaire du langage vert, “zut”

connoted something much closer to “merde,” and was used as a kind of disdainful way of

indicating one’s indifference to a problem or question; or to indicate that attempts to

reach a goal are futile and vain; finally, “zut” was used in late nineteenth-century

discourse to forcefully indicate one’s refusal to do something, or acquiesce to an

adversary.47 In essence, the Cercle zutique, in the very choice of its name, indicates a

defiant oppositionality, a militant refusal to acknowledge defeat. In sum, the name states

that the posture the zutistes had decided to collectively adopt towards the reactionary

bourgeois society that emerged from the repression of the Commune was to prolong a

lateral attack, displaced into the realm of language, on bourgeois society in the aftermath

of the Commune. In their credo, zut à tout ça, resides an attempt to remember, to repeat,

and work through the loss of (a) community of class.

And in many respects, this tone of provocation in the Album zutique seems to

intensify with the arrival of Rimbaud at the Hôtel des Étrangers. The exact trajectory of

the scandals that Rimbaud left in his wake provide something like a topographical image

of his increasing social, cultural and poetic marginalization – a marginalization that can

be mapped by following his movements from apartment to apartment in this period. From

the properly bourgeois house of Verlaine’s in-laws on the rue Nicolet (in Montmartre) the

poet is displaced to a series of increasingly squalid apartments in the Latin Quarter.

Along the way, his behavior seems to suggest that he was taking a page (and taking it a

47
A. Delvau, Dictionnaire de la langue verte (Paris: Flammarion, 1883), s.v., zut ; Emile Littré,
Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872-77), s.v., zut.
 251

step further) from Baudelaire’s musings on the painter of modern life, attempting to

transform his very being into a kind of work of art – a work of art that forms a kind of

mirror image of the rampages through the canonical forms of lyric poetry that he was

embarking on in late 1871. He notoriously embarrasses Théodore de Banville by standing

naked at the window of a chambre de bonne which de Banville had rented for him in the

rue de Buci, hurling his clothes down onto a crowd gathered in a market below. Later, he

purportedly tried to poison Charles Cros, ejaculated into Ernest Cabaner’s daily glass of

milk, and made no secret of the fact that he was Verlaine’s lover. While posing for the

Coin de table in Fantin-Latour’s studio he started political arguments that nearly become

physical altercations, and then, in the midst of this explosive mixture of communism and

homosexuality, he would evoke esthetic theories such as the necessity of doing away with

the alexandrine.48 Writing à propos of Fantin-Latour’s Le Coin de table in a journal

called Le National, de Banville would ironically quip (his own Petit traité de poésie,

which gave pride of place to the alexandrin, was about to be published, after all) :

M. Fantin se fait historien, décernant d’avance les honneurs de la peinture d’histoire à

quelques très jeunes poètes (…). A côté d’eux, voici M. Arthur Rimbaut [sic] un tout
jeune homme, un enfant de l’âge de Chérubin, dont la jolie tête s’étonne sous une
farouche broussaille inextricable, et qui m’a demandé un jour s’il n’allait pas être bientôt
49
temps de supprimer l’alexandrin.

Finally, there is the infamous incident Carjat, about which a word would be worth our

while.

Indeed, the incident Carjat illustrates at once a revealing intersection of poetry

and ethos, the utopian attempt to live as much as write poetry, to make of one’s self a

kind of critical, oppositional work of art. That is, Rimbaud’s peculiar ascesis in 1871 is

48
Graham Robb, op. cit., pp. 131-44.
49
Théodore de Banville, “Le salon de 1872,” Le National 16 May, 1872, cited in Arthur Rimbaud,1854-
1891: Portraits, dessins, manuscrits, Hélène Dufour and André Guyaux, eds. (Paris : Réunion des musées
nationaux, 1991), p. 50.
 252

what Foucault would call an “ontologie critique de nous-mêmes comme une épreuve

historico-pratique des limites que nous pouvons franchir, et donc (…) travail de nous-

mêmes et sur nous-mêmes en tant qu’êtres libres.”50 This single incident also probably

does more than any mystico-mythical interpretation of the artist’s self-immolation to

explain why Rimbaud never published any of his work while he was alive. It has the

added benefit, from the standpoint of art history, of elucidating the strange presence of

the enormous pot of flowers at the far right of Fantin-Latour’s canvas.51

Briefly, then, the incident went as follows: at some point in early March of 1872,

Rimbaud and Verlaine attended one of the Dîners des Vilains Bonshommes, most likely

at the same location on the Place St. Sulpice where some scant five months earlier

Rimbaud had wowed the audience with a reading of “Le Bateau ivre” (the slight

exception to this enthusiasm was Théodore de Banville). After the dinner was served, a

certain Auguste Creissels came to read a self-satisfied and unfortunately titled Sonnet de

combat. By all accounts, it was a true monument of mediocrity in praise of poetic order

(no doubt a crowd pleaser), but when it came to the tercets Rimbaud apparently decided

the alexandrine could do with a little more verve. He accordingly proceeded to add a

booming supplementary syllable to the end of each line:

“Sujet à cette loi, l’uniforme tercet - merde !

Se tient grave et rigide, son poste désigné – merde !”52

It was apparently at this point that the photographer Etienne Carjat – the same

who left to posterity the famous photograph of Rimbaud in Paris – decided to attempt to

50
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les lumières ?,” in Dits et Ecrits II, op. cit., p. 1394.
51
Which is itself a misconception. Rimbaud actually published at least five early poems (“Les étrennes des
orphelins,” “Les corbeaux,” “Trois baisers,” and “Les effarés”) and self-published Une saison en enfer. For
more on Rimbaud’s literary ambitions, see Murphy’s “Une saison en purgatoire…,” art. cit.
52
Auguste Creissels, “Le sonnet du combat,” La Renaissance littéraire et artistique 12, (April, 1873).
Pascal Pia, op. cit., p. 14; Graham Robb, op. cit., p. 152. My translation.
 253

forcibly eject Rimbaud from the poetry reading, calling him “petite crapule”. To which,

in front of the assembled high-society of Parisian letters, Rimbaud responded by seizing

Verlaine’s sword-cane and trying to stab Carjat.53 After such a public scandal, Rimbaud

and Verlaine were officially personae non gratae in Parnassus: they stopped attending

the poetry readings, Etienne Carjat destroyed the negatives of the photos he had taken of

Rimbaud, and Albert Mérat, whose sonnets the pair had parodied in the Album zutique’s

“Sonnet du trou du cul,” refused to be represented in the company of Rimbaud and

Verlaine on Fantin-Latour’s painting, Un coin de table (Mérat would later describe

Verlaine and Rimbaud to Edmond Goncourt as “de maquereaux, de voleurs”).54 The

painter was forced to improvise an ad-hoc replacement to balance out the canvas’s spatial

architecture at the last minute (i.e., the large vase full of flowers).

Thus, by adding a supplemental, scatological syllable to an alexandrine at a

Parnassian dinner party, and by then behaving basically like some anti-communard

stereotype come to life, Rimbaud put an end to his literary career before it had even really

begun. Still, the Carjat incident only becomes truly comprehensible once we understand it

as the expression of an intricately textured and trebly-articulated project of ethics (in the

sense of ethos as a “work of the self”), politics, and esthetics. One must bear in mind that,

despite the crudeness of the monosyllable that Rimbaud chose to addend to Creissel’s

53
Graham Robb, ibid. Some 24 years after the event, Verlaine recounts this infamous scandal, which he
largely attributes to an adolescent not being able to handle his drink, in the 1895 preface to the Vanier
edition of the Poésies complètes. Verlaine is here trying to set the record straight (a term we employ a little
ironically, less for Verlaine’s sexual orientation than for his tendency to occasionally revise history), and
create a counter-image of Rimbaud as a misunderstood poetic genius dedicated to the Ideal. What Verlaine
is explicitly refuting with respect to the Carjat incident is Charles Murras’s account from the preface
(replete with thinly veiled homophobia) to his unpublished Reliquaire (i.e., Rimbaud’s poetry) in which he
has Rimbaud stabbing Carjat in the stomach with the sword-cane. See Paul Verlaine, “Préface: Arthur
Rimbaud, Ses Poésies Complètes,” in Les Fêtes galantes, La Bonne Chanson, Romances sans paroles,
Écrits sur Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 119.
54
Cited in, Arthur Rimbaud 1854-1891: Portraits…, op. cit., p. 50.
 254

alexandrine, the mere fact of adding any 13th syllable would have been deeply shocking

to the assembled poets. But nothing should shock us less, given that the larger context of

Rimbaud’s early verse poetry is precisely that of a meticulous destabilization of the

alexandrine and the sonnet, and ultimately, at precisely the point when he is writing

poems with the Cercle zutique, their destruction, or “destructuration”. Understood thus,

the Carjat incident appears more like the logical outcome of a revolutionary approach to

esthetic form that refuses to disentangle poetry from politics. It fits, in other words, into a

much larger project of “subversification,”55 from which it is not implausible to infer that

Fantin-Latour might have been alluding by giving this portrait, which was supposed to be

a hommage à Baudelaire, the title Un coin de table. For it is precisely in this

(double)corner, trebly marginalized on the level of representation, represented, and ethos,

or attitude, that we find the veritable inheritors of that modernity which is marked by the

(traumatic) absence, or blot, of the empty frame in the background of the tableau where

Baudelaire was supposed to figure. As Lionel Cuillé affirms, the ethos of this isolated

couple is as entirely zutique as it is revealing of the tensions within the Vilains

Bonhommes: Verlaine’s glass is filled to the brim with wine (as opposed, Cuillé notes, to

the more subdued attempt to épater les bourgeois that consists of drinking coffee in a tea-

cup), and Rimbaud, whose gaze crosses that of Verlaine, is represented in the critical

posture of turning his back on the authors – and the authoritative poetry that they embody

– of the day, top-hats and dignified poses à la Napoléon and all.56

55
I borrow this term from Philippe Rocher. See Philippe Rocher, “Les possibilités harmoniques et
architecturales des détachements syntaxiques et de la frontalité chez le premier Rimbaud,” Parade sauvage
- Colloque n°5 (16-19 septembre 2004), p.285.
56
See Lionel Cuillé’s excellent analysis of this painting in, “Album de Table et Coin Zutique: Stratégies de
Légitimation,” in La Poésie jubilatoire, op. cit., pp. 83-101.
 255

Henri Fantin-Latour, Un coin de table (1872), Musée d’Orsay, Paris

And this is to say nothing of his unabashed homosexuality at a point in time when

homosexuality was not only criminal,57 but when “unmanly behavior” was put on the

same footing as treason, deployed as an explanation for everything from the defeat of the

French at the hands of the Prussians, to the degeneration of the French “race”.58 Indeed,

Verlaine and Rimbaud both made such a spectacle of their relationship that Verlaine’s

friend Edmond Lepelletier began to very publically distance himself from the two. In an

article recounting the premier of Albert Glatigny’s one-act play, Le Bois, at the Odéon,

Lepelletier would essentially “out” the couple, writing in lines dripping with

condescension:

Tout le Parnasse était là (…) sous l’oeil de son éditeur Alphonse Lemerre. On remarquait
çà et là le blond Catulle Mendès donnant le bras au flave Mérat (…). Le poète saturnien,
59
Paul Verlaine, donnait le bras à une charmante jeune personne, Mlle Rimbaut [sic].

57
Article 334 of the Napoleonic Code – criminalizing outrages to public morals and the debauchery of
minors – was of course still being applied arrest and charge gay people with crimes (as it would until
1978). Cf., Michel Foucault, “La Loi de la pudeur,” in Dits et Ecrits II, op. cit., pp. 763-77.
58
See, inter alia, Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 1-21, 161-185.
59
Cited in Arthur Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 409.
 256

In fact, if we were to write a book called “how to make enemies and alienate

people,” anecdotes of Rimbaud’s behavior in Paris between September 1871 and March

1872 would be as good a place as any to look for practical examples of what not to do in

polite society, much less amongst conservative literary circles into the door of which one

is trying to sneak one’s (in this case, grubby) foot.

A propos of “grubbiness,” Rimbaud’s vagabondage and infamous lack of hygiene

– he’s described as something of a perambulating miasma by his friends at the time –

form important components in the work, or practice, of oppositionality with which

Rimbaud engages in 1871 on the level of poetics, politics, and ethics.

We can, and certainly ought to, see hygiene as both a normative effect and

technology of disciplinary discourse. Hygiene comes to us via military medicine, after

all. Lack of it can therefore be posited as an ascetics (i.e., a work of/on the self) inscribed

in a counterdiscursive logic of the body, the self, and the other that is consciously willing

to put the biopolitical well-being of the social “body” and/or the “race” in danger to make

a point.60 A genealogical corollary of this “work on/of the self” can be traced back to the

pre-socratic philosophical tradition known as “cynicism,” or l’école des chiens.61

Rimbaud’s strategy of choosing to adopt a position of poverty and marginality is,

properly speaking, cynical: it is an ethical maneuver rather than the result of simple

socio-economic problems. In the manner of the cynics, Rimbaud adopts a posture of

opposition in order to render visible and legible the scandalous truth of capitalism and

60
See, for instance, Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Judith Surkis, op. cit., pp. 212-42.
61
“Chiens” because the cynics chose to sleep outdoors, in the streets (like dogs, then), and to make an
ostentatious spectacle out of their poverty. See Jean-François Pradeau, “Le Sujet ancien d’une éthique
moderne” and Frédéric Gros, “ La Parrhêsia chez Foucault (1982-84),” in Michel Foucault, le courage de
la vérité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), pp. 131-70. See also the introductory lecture of
Michel Foucault’s last course at the Collège de France, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, T. II: le
courage de la vérité (Paris: Seuil, 2009).
 257

bourgeois society, namely, that, as if by dialectical necessity, such a system ineluctably

produces such margins as the price to be paid for the comfort of the few.

The same could be said of vagabondage, which as Simone Delattre, taking a cue

from Foucault, has suggested was something of an element of nocturnal abnormality with

which urban authorities (i.e., the police) in the nineteenth century were obsessed.62 A

vagabond isn’t just someone who hasn’t got a place to sleep. A vagabond is also, and

even first and foremost, a form of activity that problematizes discipline amongst “les

ouvriers insubordonnés, les soldats sans permission, les rassemblements, les rixes, les

jeux, les petits commerces illégaux, les cafés et cabarets turbulents (…) [et] des voleurs

qui se couchent ainsi pour éviter d’être arrêtés et faire l’homme ivre.”63 The vagabond is

a kind of sub-category of an already marginal population, the ultimate sans-part, to

borrow Rancière’s term, the spectre that haunts disciplinary power with his/her constant

movement, his/her essential (non)position as nocturnal passer in perpetual movement – a

movement from which no value can be extracted, whose space-time is that of a kind of

résistance désoeuvrée to the increasingly normalized social space-time of the

bourgeoisie. As Delattre argues, “errer n’est pas en soi une activité définissable, mais une

attitude irresolue face à l’espace et au temps.”64 Finally, by sleeping on the very threshold

separating the private from the public, every vagabond is a kind of virtual communist

62
See Louis Canler, Mémoires de Canler, ancien chef du service de sûreté (Paris: Mercure de France,
1986), pp. 124, 142, 166-221, 463-508. See also, infra, note 141 on Frégier’s Des classes laborieuses et
dangereuses.
63
Simone Delattre, Les Douzes heures noires: la nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000),
pp. 292-3.
64
Ibid., p. 337.
 258

transgressing and contesting the validity – to say nothing of the sacrosanctity – of a

notion like “private property”.65

According to Marx, the “vagabond” is the figure of floating populations, and in

rhetorical terms, we might say that, for Marx, the vagabond is an essential spectral

metonym recalling a precise epoch in the development of capitalism – that of the

massive violence, and the unmediated collusion of the power of the state for disciplining

displaced labor, of primitive accumulation.66 Perhaps, then, what smut and lice and

constant mobility (i.e., vagabondage) suggest is a posture of in/undisciplining the body,

and, if not pragmatically troubling the very notion/truth regime of property and propriety

(le “propre”) at least pointing towards, in the guise of a critical refusal, its historical

violence.67

The “propre” is precisely the node at which an individual ethos of opposition to

normative regimes of the self meets the problematic at the heart of the writerly

65
Ibid., p. 349. In the margins of the “Trois conneries” that Rimbaud wrote, and of which “Paris” is the
second of three “sonnets,” Verlaine offers next to the poem “Jeune goinfre,” in which he is probably the
object of a parody presenting him as a drunkard who mistakenly drinks a powerful laxative, the following
parodic takes on two antithetical nineteenth-century maxims: “La pédérastie est un cas – un cas bandable”;
and “La proprété, c’est le viol”. In the latter contrepeterie, we can of course hear a citation of Proudhon’s
important pamphlet, “Qu’est-ce que la propriété?” See, Steve Murphy, Stratégies de Rimbaud, op. cit., p.
193.
66
Karl Marx, “Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The
Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I
(London: Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1990), pp. 896-904. Indeed, these passages of Marx are in
their way quite crucial for understanding Foucault’s genealogy of disciplinary power, and suggest that,
perhaps more than Foucault himself was willing to acknowledge, Marx is a constant and “spectral”
interlocutor for Foucault. For, at base, his critical enterprise is quite similar to Marx’s: to historically
situate, so as to critique them, the strategies and tactics that led to the consolidation of the political and
economic power of the bourgeoisie. At the forefront of these tactics are, of course, disciplinary discourse
and technologies of power applied to the (social) body.
67
We’ll note that the figure of the vagabond is one to which Rimbaud returns in a remarkable prose poem
in the Illuminations entitled, precisely, “Vagabonds”. Note the recurrence of the solar and fraternal motifs,
which might very well be read within the context of socialist rhetoric and iconography of the late
nineteenth-century: “Après cette distraction vaguement hygiénique je m’étendais sur une paillasse. Et,
presque chaque nuit (…) le pauvre frère se levait, la bouche pourrie (…) J’avais en effet, en toute sincerité
d’esprit, pris l’engagement de le rendre à son état primitif de fils du soleil.” In, Arthur Rimbaud, op. cit., p.
303.
 259

community. The very gesture of writing en-commun, together, as a collective act of

meaning-making, and of writing in the mode of parody, corresponds to a similar

upending of the notions of the propre, of property, and of propriety.

The collective work poses a particularly thorny problem to the economic circuit

and determination of authorship as a kind of property that Foucault theorizes under the

term of the “author function”. Part of Foucault’s larger point here, along with the

privileging of literary space over a constantly receding authorial subject, is that this

relationship riveting the “name” of an author to a text is a genealogical one, behind which

we find a game of power taking place within the apparatus of bourgeois legal

institutions.68 The collective text furthermore transgresses a rule specific to the economy

of the “signature” by the end of the nineteenth century, namely, that the proper noun that

is the object of an “authoritative” signature designates, authorizes, and grounds the

meaning of the text in the identity of an individual using language to generate and

disseminate meanings. The text is thereby not only proper for publication, that is, the text

can pass the inspection of the apparatuses of censorship; more imperative is the ability to

attribute authorship for the text to one writer who is responsible for its propriety, for the

semiotic and semantic operations carried out in (and in-between) its lines.69 At a point

when the model for sovereignty, when the horizon for intelligibility both in terms of

authorship and political agency, was more than ever that of the autonomous individual,

the literary collective is a kind of libidinal site figuring the possibility of, and soliciting

68
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, Donald Bouchard, Ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 120-30.
69
Jeffrey Mehlman, glossing Marx, reminds us that amongst the first authoritarian gestures towards curbing
freedom of expression in the late 2nd Republic was a law enacted by the Parti de l’Ordre requiring that
every newspaper article “bear the name of its author.” Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/
Hugo/ Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 5.
 260

the desire for, thinking imaginary and political relations differently, in terms of both

difference and equality.

If, as Foucault suggests, the “proper name” of the author functions to designate a

category of discourse engaged in a kind of truth game,70 what do we do with a collection

of texts that, precisely, doesn’t have a single, unique author, but a multiplicity of them?

What do we do with a body of collective texts that split the apparent subject/signature

from the text in a parodic play that seems designed less to guarantee the coincidence of

author/text than to make that relationship tremble. Of course, in the wake of Derrida, it is

impossible not to perceive the aporia that resides in the privileging of the “signature” as

an authoritative, genitive instance of transparent, stable signifiers. Rather, as Derrida

underscores, the a priori condition, the propre, of the signature is, like language itself, is

its very impropriety, its capacity to circulate endlessly, its iterability, its internal,

disavowed difference.71 At this point, and before turning back to an interrogation of the

uses and misuses of proper names and space in the Album zutique, we might add a word

concerning the theoretical intersections of parody, language, the thinking of (a politics of)

community.

70
Best described by Foucault as an “ […]ensemble de procédures qui conduisent à un certain résultat, qui
peut être considéré, en fonction de ses principes et ses règles de procédure, comme valable ou pas, gagnant
ou pas.” Michel Foucault, “L’éthique du souci de soi comme règle de la liberté,” in Dits et Ecrits, II (Paris :
Gallimard, 2001), p. 1544.
71
Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, Peggy Kamuf,
ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 80-112. See also Derrida’s response to Searle in
“Limited Inc a b c”: “[N]either can nor ought one to exclude, even ‘strategically’, the very roots of what
one purports to analyze. For these roots are two-fold: you cannot root-out the ‘parasite’ without rooting out
the ‘standard’ [le propre] at the same time […]. [T]he so-called ‘standard cases’ are reproduced, mimed,
simulated, parasited, etc., as being in themselves reproducible, already parasiticable, as already impure.”
Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc a b c,” in Limited Inc (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern Illinois University Press,
1988), p. 91
 261

IV. On Parody and Genius: Methods and Theories of Writing, Community, and
Critique
In her work on Claude Simon, Mária Minich Brewer argues that parody has a

crucial mediating function linking the esthetic and the literary to the domain of social and

historical antagonisms.72 While we shall devote some time to a discussion of recent

theorizations of parody, the fundamental relationship binding the esthetic to the social in

parody is one that we must not lose sight of. Indeed, as Brewer states in the course of her

engagement with the problematics of parody and postmodernity, we must be attentive to

the relationship between text and the (social, historical, ideological, etc.) context, a

relationship which is produced through the play of repetitions, re-writings, and re-

iterations occurring between the parodied and parodic discourses: “parody creates

connections and passages between the esthetic and the cultural (…), between the

discourses of fiction and the contexts in which they have their effects. In this perspective,

parody works to undermine attempts to sever language from social discourse.”73

Margaret Rose reminds us in her genealogy of parody that the first example of

what we might call a literary theory of parody is, revealingly, in fact the very absence of

a theory of comedy or parody in Aristotle’s Poetics. In chapter five of the Poetics,

Aristotle inaugurates what will become a centuries-long tradition of marginalizing a

potential democratic heterogeneity (in the sense that it hybridizes “epic vocabulary (…)

[and] mock-heroic subjects”)74 of language and literature when he defines comedy, and

72
Mária Minich Brewer, Claude Simon: Narrativities without Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press 1995), p. 78. See also, Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Daniel Sangsue’s La Relation parodique (Paris: José Corti,
2007). Parodic displacements and deformations in Rimbaud’s verse work have also been investigated by
Steve Murphy in his 2002 essay, “Détours et détournements: Rimbaud et le parodique,” art. cit., pp. 77-
126.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid., p. 7.
 262

specifically parody, as a kind of negatively charged, unserious, unimportant form of

mimesis exaggerating “Man’s” defaults and, in extensio, the political organization of the

city. This same ontological and formal disruption linking mimesis to democracy results in

the banishment of poetry from the City in Plato’s Republic.75

Because it is purported to show mankind as worse than it may be, and no doubt

because of its status as a “low-brow” mode of art adequate perhaps for entertaining the

peanut gallery but not dignified for consideration by serious artists, parody has

historically constituted what we might call the limit of literary practice (though Brewer

recalls that, in the enlightenment, and in particular in Kant’s Anthropology, parody is

privileged as a site where the self can potentially be divested of its prejudices).76 It has

long been negatively conceived of as a kind of parasite on language with a pathological

propensity for degradation of the “original” through a repetition that adulterates, alters its

initial network of meanings and interlocutors. Parody, taken as an instance of uncanny

75
According to Rose’s reading of Quintilien, the key operation involved in parody is that of simulation.
Such topoi can be easily located, for example, in Aristophanes’ utopian parodies Clouds and Birds, which
both structurally take as their point of departure a departure from (the corruption of) society as such. Still,
this very description of the mechanics of parody ought to remind us that Aristotle and Plato’s accounts of
poetry exist in a deontological tension with one another in Ancient Greece. According to Aristotle, the
defining feature of poetry, as opposed to rhetoric, is mimesis, imitation. As for his precursor, Plato does not
dispute this cortical feature of poetry, but rather makes of it the justification of banishing poets from the
ideal City (there are some preconditions to this “ban,” however, as E.S. Burt has pointed out in her Poetry’s
Appeal). What I am trying to suggest here is that both Plato and Aristotle, while coming to divergent
positions on the meaning of poetry’s role in the City (i.e., Is it a form of necessary catharsis, or a dangerous
perversion of the phenomenal-noumenal order that is the foundation of the Just City?) come to the similar
conclusion that poetry is a kind of mimetic reproduction – dare we say parody?- of reality. Jacques
Rancière theorizes the relationship between parody/poetry and democracy under the register of the
“anachronism,” or a scandal that consists in democracy/mimesis’s misuse of the “proper” (and, one might
add, propriety and property). Such democratic/parodic impropriety, for example, can from speaking with
another’s discourse, imitating another’s style. See Aristophanes, The Complete Plays (New York: New
American Library, 2005), pp. 129-201, 333-415; Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle (New
York: The Modern Library, 1984), pp. 223-30; Plato, Plato’s Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974),
especially books III, IX, and X; see also, Margaret Rose, op. cit., pp. 28-33. Jacques Rancière, The Names
of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 30. See
also, E.S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000).
76
Mária Minich Brewer, op. cit., p. 155, n. 1. Examples such as Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Diderot, and
Voltaire also suggest that, as we move historically closer to the constitution of the modern, western subject,
parody becomes an important site where the literary and the political converge.
 263

repetition, of deferral and differing of meaning, adheres to the logic of the dangerous

supplement; its dynamic is that of one work grafting onto another and perverting while

metadiscursively commenting upon both the code and the implicit principles of the

“original”. On that note, it is important to recall that, amongst the chain of signifieds

linked to para-, we also find: “amiss, faulty, disordered, improper (…), alteration,

perversion, simulation”.77

We might go so far as to argue that, in order for something like “literature” to

ground and constitute itself, its polyglossic excess – its excess of potential meanings, its

excess of words, its excess of potential speakers, its capacity to be parodied – must be

marginalized. Parody, then, figures one such instance of an excess in language that

undoes, perverts or irremediably transforms the “meaning” of the original through the

very act that characterizes language as a system for generating meanings, namely,

through repetition and differentiation. It points therefore not so much to language’s

capacity to ground subjective reality and the speaker in a stable world of referential ideas

and identities but, rather to the contrary, to decenter the subject as the unassailable

ground of governable meanings. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, “la parodie est la théorie de

et la pratique de ce qui se trouve à côté de la langue et de l’être (…), de l’être à côté de

soi-même de tout être et de tout discours (…) ; comme paraontologie, [elle] exprime

l’impossibilité de la langue à rejoindre la chose, et celle de la chose à trouver son nom

propre.”78

77
Margaret Rose, op. cit., pp. 33-36. Mária Minich Brewer provides a helpful gloss on Derridian
deconstruction and the parodic, noting that for Derrida parody is a crucial mode of writing that eludes
mastery (e.g., psychic or semiotic), questions the categories ownership or authority, and troubles the
foundations of ipseity. See Mária Minich Brewer, op. cit., p. 77.
78
Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 2006), pp. 56-7.
 264

In such a decentering, in this disjunction of word and thing, of substance and

property (or proper-ness), parody also points to the radical intertextuality (or being-in-

common) of the world of signs, of language. In operating, as Bakhtin put it, as a kind

dialogue between often irreconcilably differing points of view,79 parody underscores

language and writing’s situationality, its fundamental role as a matrix for generating

relationships and contexts within an internally stratified, historically determined

collective (i.e., society). Parody, in sum, appears as an act of language that is at once a

reflection upon language, upon the Other’s discourse, and a form of consciousness of

language as being not just synchrony,or purely formal structure, langue in the Saussurian

account, but also diachrony, an inter-relational, dynamic, social use of parole. It is not

just text, but a text that designates its con-textuality, its relationship to other texts and,

ultimately, to the biggest text of them all, ideology. For, in Bakhtin’s formulation, the

“parodic-travestying consciousness” is oriented towards the Other’s discourse in the form

of a commentary. It is in this critical gesture of parodic objectification that, according to

Bakhtin, “[l]anguage is transformed from the absolute dogma it had been within the

narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working

80
hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality.” Thus, at the heart of parody,

Bakhtin locates something like an inherent capacity for ideological de-mystification, a

capacity to function as what Richard Terdiman would call a “counter-discourse”. That is,

parody functions as a (use of) discourse that situates, problematizes and troubles the

“dominant” discourse’s hierarchical difference, a difference which would otherwise pass

79
“Thus it is that in parody, two languages are crossed with each other (…) as (…) rejoinders in an
argument.” Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2004), p. 76. Cf. also, Mária Minich Brewer, op. cit., pp. 80-2.
80
Mikhail Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 61.
 265

for unsituatable and unproblematic, neutral and unmarked. 81 Parody troubles, in other

words, the hegemonic.

Such considerations point us toward a further theoretical complexity that inheres

to the practice of parody, one that is preserved in the very prefix “para”. Just as a

paradox is a discourse that is “along-side” (à coté de la plaque, as it were) commonly

received wisdom or doxa, the parodic text is a “song” that imitates in the sense of

“accompanies,” goes along with another (the hypotext). But in this “accompaniment,” the

parodic text can adopt the semantically more aggressive posture of oppositionality. Para

can also denote a relationship of confrontation.82 The ambiguity at stake in the term’s

prefix points to the impossibility of definitively deciding on the relationship of the parody

to the text being parodied and, ultimately, of deciding on, or closing down the semantic

operations of the text tout court. In short, from the “ancients” to the “post-moderns,”

parody poses the problem of difference and repetition, that is, of “singing in the style of

an original but with a difference”. In so doing, the parodic gesture disturbs the

transparency of concepts such as “authorship” and “(af)filiation”.83

81
Richard Terdiman, op. cit., pp. 21-3.
82
We ought to put some pressure on this sense of critique contained in the prefix, and hear in it a distant
echo of class critique in ancient Greece. It is possible that the first “parodies” were of the Pindaric “odes” –
that is, songs sung in praise of the aristocrats whose champions had prevailed in the Olympic games.
83
Interestingly, Verlaine refers in a letter to the zutist sessions as the “Diner des Cygnes,” giving us a sense
of the importance for Baudelaire amongst these “fringe” artists of Parnassus. Indeed, this ambivalent co-
presence in tension of affiliation and opposition explains (i.e., because the fringe of Parnassus was known
as the “baudelairians”) the presence of parodies, in the first pages of the Album Zutique, of both Hugo’s
Légende des siècles, and Baudelaire’s “La mort des amants” by Léon Valade and Paul Verlaine. “La mort
des cochons” is a collaborative text that Seth Whidden has elsewhere richly interrogated. For our purposes,
we would simply point up the kind of radical materialization and democratization of the lyric subject in this
parody, a point that Whidden, given the constraints of the essay-format in a collection of studies,
unfortunately has to pass over while designating it as a crucial topos in the Album. Verlaine and Valade
manage to irremediably subvert the lyrical “nous” of love poetry by radically materializing, by em-bodying
the collective pronoun in a relationship of horizontalized equality situated in a practice of the self. Paul
Verlaine and Léon Valade, “La mort des cochons,” in L’Album zutique, op. cit., p. 89; Seth Whidden,
“Poetry in Collaboration in the 1870s: The Cercle Zutique, ‘Le Fleuve’, and ‘The Raven’,” Models of
Collaboration, op. cit., pp.77-91.
 266

Thus, it is possible to think of the collective texts of the Album zutique, and more

generally of the process of collaboration, as a kind of parody of the term “genius” (génie)

that renders visible the aporia of meaning, the gap between the solitary writer in control

of meaning and the literary collective that refuses to accept the bracketing off of a text

from its context and situation of enunciation. For collective writing, and writing

collectives, might best be thought of as a critical practice that exploits the somewhat

complex polysemic potential of the term “génie” in French, both underscoring and

undermining the conception of the Author and his production as free from social,

cultural, political and historical determinations. Under a certain mystifying discursive

configuration, a “genius” can be considered as the individual par excellence. Théophile

Gautier, who was not alone in this regard, invites the reader to understand literary

“genius” in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin in precisely this highly

individualizing acceptation. Lamenting the increasing commoditization of literature,

Gautier concludes on a note of bitter “phoremophobia”:84

Une pièce se fabrique absolument comme un habit ; l’un des collaborateurs prend la
mesure de l’acteur, l’autre coupe l’étoffe, et le troisième assemble les morceaux ; l’étude
du cœur humain, le style, la langue, tout cela est regardé comme rien. La collaboration
(…) est quelque chose d’incompréhensible, et dont il ne peut résulter que des produits
hybrides et monstrueux (…). Avec un pareil mode de travail, toute inspiration est
85
impossible ; le génie est essentiellement solitaire.

In Gautier’s assertion that the artist occupies an irenic sphere of the esthetic

totally divorced from the mundane realm of vulgar affairs such as work and politics one

84
Neologism based on the Greek  (phorema), costume/clothes.
85
Théophile de Gautier, “Préface à Mademoiselle de Maupin,” cited in Seth Whidden, “Introduction: On
Collaboration,” in Models of Collaboration, op. cit., pp. 4-5. We should not be too surprised that it is in the
same preface to this 1835 work that the Parnassian credo of Art’s rigorous purposelessness (l’art pour
l’art), that is, it’s social inutility is perhaps first formulated with Gautier’s maxim that “tout ce qui est utile
est laid” (a postulate that Rimbaud methodically undermines through the use of parody in the 1871 poem,
sent to Théodore de Banville himself, “Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos des fleurs”).
 267

gains an important insight into the elaboration of the myth of the sovereign-subject of

authority (the author). More important still, we gain a sense of the logic of fetishistic

disavowal (the je sais bien mais quand même) that is inscribed in this “origin” which

makes the artist and art seem like a very “strange” thing indeed endowed with

“metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”.86 Incidentally, this ideologeme of the

solitude of the artist and the purposeful uselessness of the artistic product, its belonging

to the domain of pure exchange value that serves as the very fulcrum of the art pour l’art,

will manage in many respects to intensify as the century, and indeed capitalism with it,

draws on, with de Banville taking it to its ultimate expression in a chapter on rhymes

from his 1875 Petit traité de poésie française.87

It would seem that Gautier’s claim, and especially its deployment of the image of

the industrialization of the garment industry is marked by a symptomatic anxiety that the

literary work in the era of the threefold explosion of literacy, the print market, and

modern journalism which frequently blurred the lines between fiction and publicities for

mass-produced commodity items, may be just that…work.88 That is, work on/in language

86
Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London : Penguin, 1990), p. 163.
87
Théodore de Banville manages to add another “meter” or so to Alfred de Vigny’s tour d’ivoire in his
1875 Petit traité de poésie française, writing: “On peut sans inconvenient divulguer LE SECRET [sic] de
l’art des vers [i..e, rhyme], et cela pour deux raisons. La première, c’est que les hommes non organisés pour
l’art des vers ne croiront pas que c’est en effet le vrai secret; la seconde, c’est que, le connaissant, ils n’en
pourront absolument rien faire, car il faut pour s’en servir avoir reçu un don surnaturel et divin.” Théodore
de Banville, Petit traité de poésie française (Paris : Charpentier, 1881) pp. 47-8. See also Ross Chambers’s
analysis of the prefatory poem (“Pendant les guerres de l’empire…”) to Gautier’s Émaux et camées, in
which he demonstrates that the very representation of the artist’s solitude ought best be understood along
the psychoanalytic terms of the return of the repressed. For Chambers, the 1848 revolution returns in a
displaced, distorted form in Gautier’s poem, and indeed in the post-47 generation of French writers. Ross
Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 43-5.
88
The massive production and proliferation of little faits divers columns narrating the illicit nocturnal
activity of the classes dangereuses were often little more than works of fiction that reporters, as Dominique
Kalifa points out, often attempted to treat as copy-righted narratives. See, Dominique Kalifa, Crime et
culture au XIXe siècle (Paris : Perrin, 2005), pp. 131-156. Foucault argues (in Surveiller et Punir and
elsewhere in his courses at the Collège de France) that the fait divers constitutes a dispositif d’insécurité, a
 268

too can be a possible source of alienation; it too can be contaminated by the logic of

industrialization, whence no doubt Mallarmé’s extreme solution, near the end of the

century, consisting in simply eliminating the writing subject – that aboli bibelot

d’inanités sonores – altogether. Such anxiety can easily be detected in the estheticist

credo that closes Gautier’s Émaux et camées (“L’Art) with the opening quatrain: “Oui,

l’oeuvre sort plus belle / D’une forme au travail / Rebelle, / Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.”89

Now, while Gautier is hardly alone with respect to this theme of the increasing

parasitization of literature by the logic of a capitalist mode of production,90 the metaphor

itself might best be read as a kind of lapsus calami, as an instance of parapraxis,

suggesting something of the anxiety engendered by the erosion of the social signifier of

the “garment,” or the breakdown of its capacity to guarantee the relationship between

socio-economic rank and the subject inhabiting the “habit” (this is, after all, a typically

Balzacian problematic).

Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, and especially under the Second

Empire, the organization of garment workshops according to a logic of mass production

and the emergence of cheap, prêt-à-porter clothing lead to a decrease in the cost of the

kind of discursive formation that is a pre-requisite for the functioning of biopower, creating the image of a
political Capital besieged each and every night by a veritable armée du crime composed of internal savages
and Barbarians. This is a discursive configuration that Rimbaud, incidentally, repeatedly co-opts in order to
strategically turn it against the bourgeoisie as early as 1871, in the poem Les poètes de sept ans and as late
as the Illuminations (see especially the poems entitled “Démocratie” and “Barbares”). On l’armée du
crime, an interesting mutation within the discourse of les classes dangereuses, see Simone Delattre, Les
Douze heures noires, op. cit.; on the coextensive emergence and evolution of free-market capitalism and
modern journalism as a symbolic mode of production expressing the ideological operations of
fragmentation of experience of nineteenth-century capital, see Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-
Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), pp. 117-148. See also, Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 200-220.
89
Théophile Gautier, “L’Art,” in Émaux et camées (Paris : Charpentier et cie., 1872), p. 223. Cf., our
chapter on the ‘Cabaret-Vert’.
90
Balzac’s take on the hugolian ceci tuera cela, from the beginning of Les Illusions perdues, and Lucien de
Rubempré’s difficulties in the world of journalism leap to mind.
 269

garments, increasing its accessibility to a wider range of “consumers”.91 In fact, Gautier’s

analogizing of dramaturgy and the garment industry is almost “too true to be good,” as

his jeremiads are nearly verbatim those of Parisian skilled tailors in the 1830s who

protested against the erosion of guild privileges and the compagnonage system that

protected artisanal industry from cheaper, unskilled labor. The two-fold result of this

erosion of collective labor identities and formations in the 1830s-40s is, on the one hand,

the creation of a labor-pool of skilled tailors with unsteady economic prospects. Faced

with drastic downward pressure on wages, such tailors were gradually recruited into

industrial machinery of capitalism, where they could find steadier work mass producing

one aspect of a garment than in trying their luck as individual producers on a market

flooded with cheap goods and a “reserve army” of unskilled workers. On the other hand,

the (no doubt unintended) consequence of this structural “proletarianization” of the

garment industry is the political subjectivation of the workers in this industry who, at the

risk of seeming overly schematic, formerly tended to identify along guild (or family or

regional) rather than class lines. Along with cobblers and cabinet-makers, they were thus

at the forefront of political activism during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Such

political radicalization and subjectivation intensified under the Second Empire as the

public works undertaken by Haussmann pushed these, and other workers, into veritable

communities of class during the two decades of Napoléon III’s reign.92

Interestingly enough, one of the privileged targets of working class opprobrium

amongst cobblers in Paris was none other than Alphonse Godillot, whose surname has in

91
See Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1971) ; David Harvery, Paris:
Capital of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 183-95, 209-225.
92
David Harvey, Paris, op. cit., pp. 241-2. Let us recall that the presence of tailors, shoemakers and
cabinet-makers is a massive one during the revolution of 1848 as well as under the Commune.
 270

fact been a slangy autonym for “shoes” since the nineteenth century.93 Under the

Commune, for example, decades of economic expropriation and proletarianization were

expressed in the following request, sent by the federation of shoemakers of the 17th

arrondissement to the Commune: “Les délégués demandent qu’au lieu de livrer le travail

de la sellerie à des exploiteurs tels que Godillot et Cie., on le donne aux ouvriers eux-

mêmes qui pourraient se constituer en associations.”94

Ultimately, Gautier has, despite himself as it were, touched on the element of

productive chaos or negativity in capitalism, namely its paradoxical need to constantly

revolutionize the means of production and the accompanying need for workers, be they

shoemakers or poets, to sell, or prostitute, as Baudelaire would have it, their “human

labor”. More than any other factor, this “prostitution” was responsible for the

politicization of the French working-class.95 One wonders if the source of his anxiety

might not also reside in a kind of repressed knowledge that, under the rules of capital, the

ideologically valorized hierarchies that divide the social are more “habitual,” or

performative, than ontological.

93
Al. Godillot also happens to open the zutist sonnet “Paris,” which we will be reading in section six of this
chapter.
94
Cited in Steve Murphy, Stratégies de Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 234. Murphy also offers an exceptionally
insightful citation from Maxime Vuillaume’s memoires of the Commune, which remind us that Godillot
was in fact allowed to continue making boots for the members of the Garde Nationale. The rather ghastly
semiotic result was that his “godillots” made anyone wearing them easily identifiable as a combatant, and
thus lucky to survive the repression of the Commune. As Vuillaume laconically puts it: “Tout porteur de
godillots était fusillé.” Thus, as Murphy points out, at the moment when the Cercle zutique was meeting in
the Latin Quarter, the name “Godillot” connoted both the military and political defeat of the Commune.
Murphy, ibid., p. 235.
95
For the above comments on the Parisian garment industry, see Christopher H. Johnson, “Patterns of
Proletarianization: Parisian Tailors and Lodève Woolens Workers,” in Consciousness and Class
Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, J. Merriman, ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 68-
85; Joan Scott, “Work Identities for Women and Men: The Politics of Gender and Family in the Parisian
Garment Trade in 1848,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1999), pp.
99-113; and, Michelle Perrot, “Le Regard de l’autre: les patrons français vus par les ouvriers (1880-
1914),” in Le Patronat de la seconde industrialisation (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1979), pp. 291-9.
 271

It is all the same quite difficult to ascertain precisely how Gautier’s, and by

extension the Western philosophical tradition of privileging the self-present, cognitively

transparent individual subject, doesn’t at some level simply fold in upon its own

contradictions. Whether or not this a Sartrian instance of the flight from “engagement”

with the dialectic of History,96 or some version of the potential counter-discursivity of the

poetic, Gautier’s response to the increasing alienation of bourgeois society at mid-century

is nevertheless intriguing and internally troublesome to the extent that it consists

precisely in “upping the ante” on this alienation. Faced with the ever-increasing

saturation of the “literary” with the logic of commodification, does not Gautier demand

the literary text’s cleavage from the collective? Furthermore, does not such a demand or

“flight” invariably lead to, as Ross Chambers suggests, an intensive “reification [of the

literary text and the literary genius] as specialized, as ‘artistic’ communication and more

particularly [as] autonomized (…) as a form of communication cut off from the

circumstances of ‘direct’ communication,” that becomes the very “source of its [useless]

value”?97 In final analysis, Gautier’s statement simultaneously manages to both

underscore and undercut the triumph of the solitary artistic genius; it appears that the very

moment of the apotheosis of this figure is also always already the moment of its total

deposition by the same systemic socio-economic and political problems it set out to avoid

in the first place.

96
Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature ? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 90.
97
Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 11-12.
 272

As Seth Whidden points outs, there is something generally centrifugal to the

Parnassian esthetic.98 Its fetishization of formal rules, coming on the heels of

Romanticism’s professed desire to liberalize, if not dislocate,99 the rules of versification

could indeed be read as the esthetic correlate of the Second Empire’s endless self-

propaganda as the political regime best suited for maintaining “order” in France.

Whidden further argues that the Parnassians’ esthetic turn back to neoclassical forms

cannot be disassociated from a “turn away from their own era”.100 For perhaps

understandable ideological reasons, Sartre does not, in his rather overwhelmingly

negative assessment of l’art pour l’art movement and its artists, consider the material

difficulty and danger that a “flight into History” could occasion for artists under regimes

given to increasingly sophisticated and authoritarian methods of censorship and legal

prosecution.

For instance, the cautionary deposits necessary for starting a new journal could

reach upwards of 20,000 francs, representing a de facto form of monetary censorship.

The very existence of this deposit gives us a sense of the frequency of prosecutions for

98
Seth Whidden, Leaving Parnassus: the Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud (New York: Rodopoi,
2007), p. 17. Still, I wonder if it isn’t possible to take a different approach, even at the risk of shaping an
argument shot through with irresolvable contradictions. Whidden and others are absolutely correct to
emphasize the attempt by the poets of Parnassus to de-politicize their texts by turning away from the
present, by emphasizing strict formal rules, and by adopting as dispassionate a rhetorical posture as
possible. They were nicknamed “les impassibles,” after all – a point that is quite useful to bear in mind
when one reads “Le Bateau ivre,” which of course opens on the alexandrine: “Comme je descendais des
fleuves impassibles”. However, is not this same ethos of cool objectivity precisely that at the heart of the
scientific discourse of positivism, a discourse incompatible, to say the least, with the tenets of the Catholic
church in the nineteenth century, and thus with the Second Empire? As David Harvey puts it, “[s]cience
was not so much a method as an attitude given over to the struggle to demystify things, to penetrate and
dissect their inner essence.” Indeed, some of the nineteenth century’s more revolutionary works, such as
Courbet’s Enterrement à Ornans, Manet’s Olympia, or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, espouse just such a
“scientific” ethos of dispassionate observation that Harvey argues is actually contained, as its logical
consequence, within the Parnassian credo of l’art pour l’art. David Harvey, op. cit., p. 255.
99
Cf., Victor Hugo’s poem “Quelques mots à un autre” or his “Préface à Cromwell”.
100
As Leconte de Lisle put it, precisely lamenting what he conceived of as a conjuncture of poetry and
social utility, or industrie, that would seek to have the poet betray the rich solitude of his nature, “Je haïs
mon temps.” Charles Leconte de Lisle, “Préface,” in Poëmes et poésies (Paris: Dentu, 1855), p. iv.
 273

infractions of the draconian censorship laws that Napoleon III’s regime instituted. After

the coup d’état of December 1851, the Second Empire essentially eliminated free-speech

in the press by creating a complex, institutional apparatus of surveillance and censorship,

mandating that every article and, especially, caricature had to be approved by regime

authorities prior to publication. 101 Indeed, the press was far from being the sole object of

this repressive measure. As we pointed out in chapter one of this study, nearly every form

of mass media, from books to songs in dancehalls and café-concerts, already fell under

the purview of repressive laws dating from the final years of the Second Republic.

What’s more, the censors in these tortuous bureaucratic channels cultivated an intentional

aura of ambiguity around the “approvals” that they distributed (with a great deal of

parsimony). Official approval was always oral, so that if, retroactively, a subversive

element, whether real or simply imagined, managed to slip by these official hermeneutes,

the author could still be brought to court and fined. Such was the infamous case of André

Gill’s cantaloupe, a caricature which, although initially approved for publication, got the

satirical journal L’Éclipse banned after the reading public thought it saw Louis-Philippe

in the fruit. Of course, the two most notorious examples of literature on trial from the

period of the Second Empire are those of Flaubert and Baudelaire. The situation was no

doubt considerably worse, however, for artists attempting to enter the world of the

Parisian literati and for journalists generally speaking. In fact, political caricature as a

form of parodic or satirical oppositional discourse with which Charles Philipon, the editor

101
This right had actually been already seriously compromised by the 2nd Republic on 27 July 1849, when
the regime, fearing popular reaction on the anniversary of the repression of the Parisian working class that
swept it to power resurrected the Restauration Monarchy’s notorious lois de septembre. Little historical
details such as these add an unintended layer of irony to Hugo’s lamentations over the Peuple’s phlegmatic
refusal to be killed for the sake of the Second Republic. As Marx put it so well, “la bourgeoisie ne permet
au prolétariat qu’une seule usurpation - celle du combat.” See, “Au peuple,” in Les Châtiments (Paris:
Flammarion, 1998), pp. 256-7 ; Karl Marx, La Lutte des classes en France, 1848 à 1850 (Paris: Gallimard,
1994), p. 17.
 274

of the infamous Charivari, somewhat self-indulgently attributed actual “uncrownings”

(i.e., those of Charles X and Louis-Philippe) disappears almost entirely under the Second

Empire.

In most cases, however, it sufficed to kill a potentially dangerous pen with

kindness in order to preemptively neutralize, if not appropriate as a kind of “opposition à

l’intérieur des Tuileries,” a political threat or embarrassment. Paul Lidsky reminds us, for

example, that “Dumas fils, Flaubert, Gautier, les Goncourts, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Taine”

all frequented Princess Mathilde’s Salon.102 When that failed, there were always les

ciseaux de Dame Anastasie.103

Against individualizing readings of “genius” that seemed pervasive in French

literature at mid-century, we find a radically divergent way of conceiving of genius. That

is, “genius” can also be understood as a diffuse, imaginary collective trait. Without

having recourse to heavily-loaded notions of organicity (e.g., la terre et les morts),

“genius” can also tie together a community of equals in a collective im-property, or

impropriety. Take le génie de la langue, for example. As Rancière reminds us, the

nineteenth-century “Author” is born with its constitutive Other. That is, the very

emergence of the solitary author in his ivory tower coincides with the evaporation of the

Author into the anonymity of speech.104 For his part, Giorgio Agamben traces the

genealogy of the figure of the Genius in the west back to its Roman origins in order to

argue, in a vein similar to Rancière’s, that being-in-common, the collective, and

102
Paul Lidsky, Les Écrivains contre la Commune, op. cit., p. 17.
103
Robert J. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, op. cit., pp. 169-202. See also, Jacques
Rancière, “Good Times and Pleasure at the Barriers,” in Voices of the People: The Politics and Life of ‘La
Sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire, A. Rifkin and R. Thomas, eds. (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1988), pp.45-94.
104
Jacques Rancière, “Un communisme immatériel,” in Moments Politiques: Interventions 1977-2009
(Paris: La Fabrique, 2009), pp. 134-5.
 275

difference and division with respect to the self (i.e., the unconscious, language, etc.) are

ontological a priorii of human existence. The noun genius, for example, shares an evident

etymology with engender. In ancient Roman culture,

Genius était en quelque sorte de la divinisation de la personne, le principe qui gouverne et

qui exprime la totalité de son existence (…). Mais ce Dieu intime et si personnel est aussi
ce qui en nous est le plus impersonnel, la personnalisation de ce qui nous dépasse (…) ;
comprendre la conception de l’homme renfermée dans Genius signifie comprendre que
l’homme n’est pas seulement Moi et conscience individuelle, mais que, de sa naissance
jusqu’à sa mort, il cohabite avec un élément impersonnel et préindividuel.105

This constitutive tangle binding the self to the collective, linking literature, or

literarity, to democracy strikes an important blow to the heart of the Author-function (i.e.,

the figure of the sovereign subject governing and grounding the meaning of “his” text).

But perhaps more importantly still, the collective-text, through its very mode of being, of

presenting itself as a work of collaboration, and in the caustic repetition with difference

that is the fundamental operation of parody (as is specifically the case for texts to be

found in the Album zutique), simultaneously troubles two regimes of truth, two absolutely

crucial articulations of hegemony upon which capital depends as both an economic and

political system of organizing social relations in the nineteenth century: the collective text

upends intellectual and individual property as well as the propre of the sovereign liberal

subject of political economy.

The “genius,” then, of the texts of the Album zutique has been right before us all

along, and consists in a profound subversion of the very notion of artistic originality in

the poetic play of repetition and difference; of a submerging of the figures of the

“Author” and the “Origin” in a kind of communisme sauvage of language and

community.

105
Giorgio Agamben, op. cit., pp. 7-10.
 276

Parody, and especially collective parodies, undermines the authority of the

original, of the undivided, seamless individual “Author” governing the intentions and

potential meanings of its text. Its logic is that of supplementarity. It addends itself to the

“other text” (the hypotext, the intertext, or the paratext) and transforms it into a site of

potential perversion, subversion, or oppositional meanings – into a para-site, as it were.

(Perhaps indeed we ought to think of parody as a kind of phagocyte upon meaning that

makes the host/target text turn against itself). However, if parody has been historically

and esthetically regarded with some degree of suspicion, if not contempt, for its

relationship to sites and subjects who are not entirely propre, such as the theatre and the

demos; and if collective writing experiments and communities have quite simply been

theoretically neglected, perhaps this neglect is due to the fact that the prosthetic parodic

text and the collective text, like any text, refuse to separate themselves from the tissue of

language that constitutes them. What is troubling in parody is that it, as language, is

collective; in a word, parody uncannily points to the basic intertextuality of all texts.

Parody, along with collective writing, defiantly signposts the fact its genius is

collaborative, that no work is imagined, desired, written without or outside of a

relationship to a collective body, a community, of other texts, of the Other’s texts.106

Parody, then, is a reflection on the (inter)textuality of texts. It points towards a

shared situation of being-in-common, threaded in the tissue of language. The parodic text

irreverently comments upon, critiques, disturbs the “original”. It does so using not only a

106
Gerard Genette perhaps first suggested this idea in Palimpsestes, going so far as to conceptually displace
the term “parody” in favor of the far broader term that foregrounds the fundamental con-textuality (i.e.,
their relations of filiation, affiliation, transformation, imitation, etc.) linking texts, hypertextualité. See
Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982). However, such a shift in
conceptual nomenclature runs the considerable risk of losing sight of the critical, democratic potential of
parody as it has been understood in the modern (and post-modern ?) era.
 277

shared code but, more perversely, from within the very idiom of the original. Often, the

parodic gesture begins with an imitation of style as such,107 rendering the style, the

identifiable propre, of the original alien to itself. In doing so, parody actualizes a virtual

community, for, at base, it is a kind of collective (whether consensual or not) work upon

that common feature which makes both literature and the political possible – language.

Although parody, as we have seen, has historically been marginalized as language

or literary practice, it has not, for as much, been conceptualized as an entirely negative

phenomenon. Or rather, its very negativity has historically made it the privileged mode of

ethical and political critique. And, even if by the nineteenth century, parody has more or

less been reduced to a form of the burlesque, its fundamental relation to satire and,

especially, to the proliferation of codes characteristic of irony, made it a potentially

efficient, and therefore frequently employed, form of political critique in nineteenth-

century France for writers who had to deal with the constant menace of censorship, fines

and jail-time for speech or images deemed or imagined too overtly oppositional. Even if

this was especially true with respect to caricatures in the daily press specializing in satire,

we must not forget that it was beginning with the Second Republic’s law of 27 July,

1849,108 that nearly all symbolic media or venues of counter-cultural formation became

the object of intense government surveillance and regulation, from the daily press to

popular literature, or colportage, to books and venues of popular entertainment such as

goguettes and cabarets. In all cases, the logic, which would merely affirm itself in the

107
Margaret Rose, op. cit., p. 128.
108
The list of major nineteenth-century journalists and satirists who were imprisoned, or whose pens led to
the suppression of their journals between 1830 and 1881, when the censorship laws that the “République
des ducs” inherited from the Second Empire were abrogated, is long indeed. Amongst the most notable we
find Daumier, Vallès and André Gill, whom Arthur Rimbaud sought out, according to an amusing anecdote
related by Ernest Delahaye, during a fugue to Paris in February, 1871.
 278

explosion of disciplinary apparatuses under the Second Empire, was the same: to

preserve “order,” promote religion, and prevent subversive ideas from reaching and

circulating amongst those who are easily led-astray, those poor, child-like subjects (i.e.,

workers, women and children) so easily seduced by literary and/or political narratives

that have the potential to disrupt the imaginary economies of normative, bourgeois

subjectivity; ideas that had the capacity to create unmanageable intervals amongst those

subjects that could result in important, however localized or restricted, formations of

solidarity had to be kept out of the hands of the childish.

Charles Nisard, head of the “Commission for the Examination of Chapbooks”

under the Second Empire, best expressed the concerns of the dominant class when he

made the following affirmation, which succinctly manages to articulate the very

mechanism at work in the creation of the infans as well as to confirm Foucault’s

hypotheses about the productive relations of power/knowledge:

C’est alors qu’en voyant s’accumuler, pour ainsi dire, sous ma main, tant de matériaux
précieux pour l’histoire littéraire, je n’eus pas de peine à comprendre le parti qu’on en
pourrait tirer. J’estimai ensuite que si, dans l’intérêt des personnes faciles à séduire,
comme le sont les ouvriers et les habitants des campagnes, la commission ne devait pas
manquer d’interdire le colportage aux trois-quarts de ces livres, cette prohibition ne
regardait pas les gens à l’épreuve des mauvaises lectures, c’est-à-dire les érudits, les
bibliophiles, les collectionneurs et même les simples curieux de littérature exotique.109

In sum, in order to protect the easily-seduced, because infantile,

working/dangerous-classes from itself, it was necessary to censor those newspapers that,

in the words of the Second Republic’s Ministre de l’Intérieur, sought to “divide society

into two classes, the rich and the poor (…) thus preparing (…) all the elements of a civil

109
Charles Nisard, Histoire des livres populaires et de la littérature de colportage, cited in Adrian Rifkin,
“Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune,” Art History 2 :2 (June, 1979), p. 202. My italics.
 279

war”.110 It was even more pressing to intensively regulate, regularize, and in theory,

strictly forbid, access to micro-configurations of oppositional culture and entertainment,

such as books and songs, for certain subjects that we have come to know well and

recognize under the guise of the infans. For, to rehearse Rancière’s account of the

question,111 what good could come of a worker reading at night instead of getting the rest

required for the following day at work (that is, for the regime of capital itself)? And what

if, along with reading, that same worker were to write, and argue, along with his or her

family, that the workplace, and the differends that it generates, belong not to the realm of

private negotiations between an employer and an individual employee, but rather to the

sphere of the political and of the collective? Or, perhaps worse of all, what if they were to

have a good laugh together at the bourgeois family model whose mores and economic

thrift they were held to imitate? Or at the foreman? Or at the police, senator, priest or

Emperor?112

At the heart of this problem for discipline is the problem raised by laughter, by the

relation between the body and the text. As Bakhtin writes, the laughter provoked by

parody dehierarchizes; it takes localized instances of authority down a peg or two, when

it doesn’t risk destroying its halo of authority, its capacity to solicit identification,

outright. With the peals of laughter elicited by parodic inversion/perversion/subversion,

110
Cited in Michel de Certeau, D. Julia and J. Revel, “The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard,” in Heterologies:
Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 123.
111
See Jacques Rancière, La nuit des prolétaires…
112
See Alain Cottereau’s excellent historical contextualization and analysis of Denis Poulot’s Le Sublime,
ou l’ouvrier tel qu’il est en 1870 et tel qu’il pourrait être. This is a fascinating and, to date, under-exploited
resource providing the contemporary reader with invaluable insight into the (distorted, to be sure)
bourgeois vision of the working-classes at the end of the Second Empire. See Alain Cottereau, “Denis
Poulot’s ‘Le sublime’ – A Preliminary Study [of] Daily Life and Worker’s Resistance in Paris in 1870,” in
Voices of the People, op. cit., pp. 97-177. See especially, the sections on irony and authority (pp. 100-120;
the practices of ‘laziness’ and ‘drunkenness’ (pp. 1112-6); the daily, micro-practices of resistance linking
workers to their female companions (wives or concubines, pp. 116-26); and the character chart mapping out
the traits which, according to Poulot, separate, on a sliding scale of degradation and depravity, the “vrai
ouvrier” from the “sublime” (pp. 104-11).
 280

something of the “aura” of the original shatters as relations of power are shown to be

effects of representations that have been historically constructed. Laughter problematizes

the fundamental operation upon which the hegemonic depends, namely, the construction

of an an-historical “naturalness,” of absolute given reality, around contingent situations

of domination. Historical analysis becomes possible with parody’s “uncrowning” of epic

objects; a gaze emerges that is capable of penetrating the mystic aura surrounding

authority, capable of revealing its historical contingency as a situation, as an effect of

potentially transformable practices and regimes of truth or, as Foucault would put it, its

evenementiality.113 In parodic laughter,

the subject of serious literary representation (…) is portrayed without any distance, on the
level of contemporary reality, in a zone of direct, even crude contact (…). Laughter
demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of
familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it
(…). In this plane [of demolished hierarchies] one can disrespectfully walk around whole
objects; therefore, the back and rear portion of objects (…not normally accessible for
viewing) assume a special importance.114

With parody, we are in the domain of the collective, of historical critique, and

ultimately of democracy, for both have a citational, conflictual character – one of

displaced statements uttered by improper subjects, and of “utterances stolen and tossed

back at their authors.”115 As such, it’s probably not all that surprising that the strategic

mode of writing upon which the Cercle zutique, composed as it was by communard

sympathizers, prevailed was that of parody.

V. Rimbaud’s Zuteries and Parody

113
Michel Foucault et al. “Table ronde du 20 mai 1978,” in L’Impossible prison: recherches sur le système
pénitentiaire au XIXe siècle, Michelle Perrot, ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 43-4.
114
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, op. cit., pp. 22-3.
115
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), p. 59.
 281

The role of parody and satire in Rimbaud’s textual production from the year 1871

is so prevalent that a precise mapping out of which texts are parodic and which are not is

a difficult task to successfully undertake. Starting arguably with the declaration of poetic

and political principles that we know as the second Lettre du voyant (15 May 1871, to

Paul Demeny) and continuing on through the auto-parodies that one can find in Une

saison en enfer, from Lamartine to de Banville, in passing by Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine

and now-obscure poets such as François Coppée and Albert Mérat, there is hardly a poet

amongst the literati of the end of the Second Empire who does not at some point become

the object of a poison-pen that Rimbaud is capable of steeping deep in a well of sarcasm.

Indeed, Steve Murphy has demonstrated that the poems in verse dating roughly from the

autumn of 1870 until the summer of 1871, coinciding neatly, that is, with the time of the

siege of Paris and continuing on until the fall of the Commune, bear the imprint of a rich

intertextual relationship to political caricature from the era of the Second Empire. Indeed,

these texts frequently targeted the imperial family and, in 1871, the conservative forces of

the government of national defense seated in Versailles (for which Jules Favre, Picard

and Adolphe Thiers are taken as metonyms).116

The obvious precursor and, I would argue, immediate influence for such

interventions of poetry into history is to be found in Victor Hugo’s Châtiments. The same

could arguably be said for the poem at which we shall take a closer look in a moment,

“Paris”. At the risk of getting ahead of our argument, the massive profusion of proper

nouns in “Paris” probably has only one readily identifiable antecedent in French poetry:

that, precisely, of Les Châtiments, which famously accumulated, so as to “drag them

before the tribunal of History by the ear,” the names of those Hugo considered
116
Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op. cit.
 282

accomplices in the coup d’état. But therein also lays the difference between Rimbaud’s

poetic technique, inherited from Hugo, and Hugo’s strategy of “naming” the targets of his

political critique. With Hugo, the referents of the names are easily identifiable, whereas

with Rimbaud, they are next to impossible for a contemporary reader to easily locate. It

might be time, then, for us to consider in a new light the rather complex, important, and

ambivalent intertextual relationship between Rimbaud and Hugo. For, if we look not only

at the earlier verse poems by Rimbaud such as “Soleil et chair” or even the humorous

lyric-cum-burlesque poem known as “Les reparties de Nina,” continuing on through the

pro-Commune poetry of 1871-2 and beyond, one catches a glimpse of both a persistent

struggle to free oneself from the “anxiety of influence” and a continuing presence of the

poetic model that was Victor Hugo for the young poet. In this respect, Rimbaud has much

in common with the vast majority of nineteenth-century French poets from the 1850s on,

and especially with Théodore de Banville.117 In reading Rimbaud, one increasingly gets

the impression that the monumental shadow from under which Rimbaud was trying to

write his way out might not have been so much Baudelaire’s as it was Hugo’s.

On the importance of parodic intertexuality in the zutist sonnet “Paris” (infra, p.

284), the reference to an otherwise intriguingly bizarre “panier des grâces” is a

particularly interesting case in point. The phrase itself is an ominously ambivalent

reference no doubt, as Reboul, following Murphy, has suggested to the “commission des

grâces” before which former communards were hauled.118 But another, and in light of

117
On the long shadow that Hugo cast over poets in the nineteenth and indeed twentieth centuries, see
Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition, op. cit., p. 44. The “anxiety of influence” is a concept first
elaborated by Harold Bloom in his eponymous study, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
118
As Yves Reboul points out, this syntagma can itself be understood as a veiled, perhaps porte-manteau
combining “commission de grâce” and the lugubrious “panier” into which guillotined heads fell after
receiving the coup de grâce. It is thus a reference to the institutionalized form of versaillais violence that
 283

Murphy and Rifkin’s studies unearthing the relationship between political caricature and

poetry in the late 1860s and early 1870s, perhaps more readily discernible referent for

Rimbaud’s contemporaries and fellow members of the Cercle zutique would have been

the caricaturist Faustin’s devastatingly satirical portrait of the government of national

defense as the trois grâces, to be read homonymically also as the 3 grasses.

Rifkin’s studies remind us that the iconographic and culturally subversive subtext

of this well-known caricature that portrayed the leaders of the provisional government as

“Three Graces”. The “graces” in question were in fact those from a statue that adorned

the façade of Garnier’s new opera-house (then still under construction).119 This statue

caused no small amount of scandal when it was unveiled, as many saw in the naked

nymphs a clear reference to the high-class prostitution that went on backstage amongst

the lorettes of the Paris Opera. Caricatures of Favre, Picard, and Thiers as three grotesque

graces/prostitutes dancing around the figureheads of the Emperor and the Kaiser

functioned as a kind of visual ellipses, asyndetically drawing a straight line of historical

and ideological continuity between the fête impériale and the newly minted, arch-

conservative government.120 As Rifkin demonstrates, such caricatures also operated on a

much more subversively unconscious level of class and esthetic normativity,

was the “commission de grâces”. Louise Michel referred to these commissions as an “orgie blanche” (i.e.,
of monarchists) that brought down the coup de grâce on the political left in France for a generation. See,
Yves Reboul, op. cit., pp. 265-287; see also Louise Michel’s Letter to the Commission of Pardons (1872),
http://www.marxists.org/history/france/paris-commune/michel-louise/1872/letter-pardons.htm, consulted
08/30/2010.
119
It bears pointing out that the very existence of this new, modern opera house owes its material existence
to the political violence of the Second Empire. Its construction was ordered on a broad avenue and a larger,
sumptuous plaza after Orsini’s bomb nearly killed the Emperor in the 1860s after his carriage got stuck in
traffic trying to meander through the winding, narrow streets of the Opéra vieux.
120
The fête, or orgie, impériale refers to the perception amongst those who denounced the Second Empire
that they were living in a kind of end-times of total moral decadence, in a society constituted by disavowed
social conflict and shot-through with literal and figurative corruption, the spirit of which is perhaps best
captured in Zola’s La Curée.
 284

“deprive[ing] [bourgeois esthetic norms] of [their] supposedly de-sexualised universality,

and (…) relocat[ing] [them] in the turbulence of (…) political struggle.”121

It is crucial that we not overlook this motif of the eternal return of the same in the

realm of politics in leftist political critique from the winter of 1871. The fear that the

government in Versailles was seeking to restore a monarchical political regime was not,

as it was often depicted in the reactionary press of the année terrible, a simple case of

rhetorical hyperbole disseminated by irresponsible leftist ringleaders. The parliamentary

elections of Feb. 8, 1871 gave massive majorities in parliament to conservative, legitimist

and Orleanist monarchist, and one might surmise even Bonapartist, factions. What is

more, the professional corps of military officers were nearly to a man Bonapartists. It’s

safe to say that, under such conditions, perhaps even the Thiers’s government had to

wonder if it would last very long at all.122 Indeed, we can see a complex re-iteration of

this critique at work in “Paris” in the figure of the “sergents de ville” of the penultimate

line of the last tercet. With that in mind, and now that we have laid out the stakes of a

theoretical reading informed by parody, post-Commune politics, and the politics of

memory, let us turn presently to what is no doubt the strangest literary work to come out

of the nineteenth century, if not the French language, Arthur Rimbaud’s “Paris”.

121
Adrian Rifkin, “No Particular Thing to Mean,” art. cit., p. 44. Murphy, Stratégies de Rimbaud, op. cit.,
p. 239.
122
Robert Tombs, in a provocative if somewhat overlooked hypothesis in his The War Against Paris,
argues precisely that some of the total carnage of the semaine sanglante must be attributed not only to the
duplicity and crimes of omission on the part of Thiers with respect to drawing careful distinctions between
civilians and combatants pris les armes à la main, but also to the simple fact that the civilian government
very likely lost control of its army for a week or so as Paris was reconquered by a deeply conservative
Army not only still smarting from defeat at the hands of the Prussians and relatively fresh from urban and
rural civilian massacres in Mexico and Algeria, but which was also determined to wipe out the biopolitical
threat posed by the rebellious working-classes once and for all. Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris,
1871, op. cit. pp. 109-23.
 285

VI. “Paris”: Memory, Community, and Anticapitalism in the Capital

Le grand poème de la marchandise chante ses strophes de couleur,

de la Madeleine jusqu’à la porte St. Denis.
Balzac, Le Diable à Paris

(Conneries) II.

Paris

Al. Godillot, Gambier,

Galopeau, Wolf-Pleyel,
— Ô Robinets ! — Menier,
— Ô Christs ! — Leperdriel !

Kinck, Jacob, Bonbonnel !

Veuillot, Tropmann, Augier !
Gill, Mendès, Manuel,
Guido Gonin ! — Panier

Des Grâces ! L'Hérissé !

Cirages onctueux !
Pains vieux, spiritueux !

Aveugles ! — puis, qui sait ? —

Sergents de ville, Enghiens
Chez soi. — Soyons chrétiens !

A.R.123

“Strange” may in fact be a woefully inadequate litote for describing this poem.

The heuristic and poetic problems it raises are at least three-fold. First, it poses a

gargantuan semantic challenge to the reader to the extent that the quatrains are nearly

entirely composed of (some really quite obscure) proper nouns. Second, as far as sonnets

go, it’s a strange one indeed that is missing half of its syllables. Finally, the structural

legibility of the poem as such is strained to the breaking point by a kind of riot of

punctemes and at least one audacious inter-strophic enjambment (lines 8-9).

Thus, when we first encounter this text, it’s awfully tempting to see in its dizzying

fragmentation and chaotically disorienting use of language a kind of anticipation of

Mallarmé’s call for the disparution élocutoire, the disappearance of the writing-subject in

favor of the pure play of the signifier. Inversely, it might be read as a kind of weird
123
Arthur Rimbaud, “Paris,” in Oeuvres complètes, A. Guyaux, éd. (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), pp. 174-5.
 286

perversion of the Parnassian fetishization of form, as a parody of that movement’s

methodical attempt to disassociate text from context, or poetry from its situation of

enunciation. Yet, as Yves Reboul has pointed out, if anything, the problem in “Paris” is

precisely the opposite.124 If anything, in this glut of proper nouns, publicity slogans, and

semantically opaque phrases such as “paniers de grâces” and “sergents de ville,” we are

faced and perhaps even overwhelmed with the sheer presence of history. We are placed

in the meta-theoretical position or dilemma of every reader when s/he is forced to

contemplate his/her own role in the construction, constitution, and negotiation of a text’s

meaning(s): we know it refers to something, it means to mean something, but where and

how do we start to figure out what? As such, this poem, no doubt like all poetic uses of

language, is its own allegorization; it is an allegory of language as collective,

interpretable, and divided, inherently differential and multiple, traversed by history.

In the following section we shall attempt to tease some sense out of the poem, and

engage specifically with an element in the “sonnet’s” last tercet that I think calls out for

commentary. Notably the syntagma that closes the text: “Aveugles – (…) – soyons

chrétiens!” For if we regard this last tercet as a kind of intensification and condensation

of the poem’s reliance on the reader’s capacity to decipher the implicit critiques that the

poet slips into the sonnet by deterritorializing the “proper” name, we may be able to

discern, in fact, a surprisingly intelligible critique of class domination and violence. I

would just state now that in the following section, I rely principally on Murphy’s

Stratégies de Rimbaud and Reboul’s Rimbaud dans son temps, for these are the sole texts

that engage with “Paris” in any kind of critically or hermeneutically meaningful way.

Though both are perspicuous in their archaeologies of this text, they both pass somewhat
124
Yves Reboul, op. cit., pp. 265-8.
 287

rapidly over the final tercet, and in particular the injunction which closes the text. What

thus takes place in their otherwise admirable analyses, is a kind of unfortunate closing

down of the text’s potential signifying operations – an inevitable closure perhaps, for

such is the nature of “close readings,” but one which is carried out at the expense of some

of the poem’s larger, implicit topoi dealing with memory, violence, and community.

First of all, we must be struck by the fact that this final injunction, “soyons

chrétiens!,” appears to have a semantic importance that is over-determined both by its

formal position as the last rhyme in this traumatized “sonnet” and by the graphic isolation

of the dash which puts it into particularly vivid relief. Traditionally, the sonnet has two

important semantic loci: the 9th line, or the opening of the tercets at the volta, and the

final tercet.125 If “Paris” isn’t exactly a “traditional” sonnet (a point to which we’ll come

back), we’ll have noticed that Rimbaud nevertheless seems to give pride of semantic

place to the final rhyme in the last tercet of this text in a formally traditional manner.

Notice, for example, that an “s” has been appended to “Enghiens” to create a visual

rhyme with “chrétiens”.

Interestingly enough, rather than a rupture with the technical cultivation of

“subversification” that we explored above in “Le Dormeur du Val” and “Au Cabaret-

vert,” “Paris” prolongs and in many respects radicalizes the esthetic enterprise of a poetic

revolution deeply linked to the ethos of the Paris Commune. That is, “Paris” represents a

systematic intensification of these same techniques, for example, in the domain of the use

of enjambment, punctuation, and lexis, or the adequation of subject matter and form, that

challenge the legibility and norms of the lyric poem and voice. It is a sonnet that thus

125
Susan Blood, “Baudelaire against Photography: an Allegory of Old Age,” MLN 101:04 (Sept. 1986), pp.
817-25.
 288

figures (pace Ruff) as one of the most important texts in the Rimbaldian corpus for

understanding and mapping out the poet’s development towards a freer form of poetic

expression.

The entire last tercet is so chaotically mangled by a profusion of punctuation

marks that reading it becomes something of a metaphor for the poem itself, doubling

down, as it were, on the difficulty of making sense out of the complex network of

patronyms in the quatrains that are initially so puzzling for the contemporary reader.

Faced with such a text, the temptation is perhaps greater than one would like to admit to

repeat the gesture of prior literary critics such as Suzanne Bernard or Marcel Ruff who

ascribe to this text (and, one might add, to the zuteries in general) the status of infantile,

free-association word-games, or more charitably to a kind of curious, hermetic

experimental writing technique foreshadowing the purportedly impenetrable, if stunning,

texts to come in the Illuminations.

Advertisement for Enghien mineral water, circa 1870126

126
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.arthurrimbaud.be/images/get/enghien.jpg, accessed
04/01/2011.
 289

With respect to the final rhyme pair, Enghiens/chrétiens, critics such as Claude

Jeancolas (correctly) propose to see a reference to an advertisement for a mineral water

from the town of Enghien (which was renowned for its thermal baths). But he then goes

on to detect a sly reference to masturbation in the paronomastic proximity between

Enghiens and “engin,” common slang for the masculine sex.127 Thus, there would be a

kind of discrete acknowledgement and critique of the late nineteenth-century hygienic

obsession with regulating the potentially disastrous pleasure that the child can find in

masturbation (which, amongst other potentially deleterious effects, could render a child

“blind,” or “aveugle”).128 This biopolitical discursive configuration linking health,

population and sexuality together in common cause no doubt first emerges, as William

Peniston reminds us, with Tissot during the eighteenth century.129 For Tissot, whose

discourse on masturbation would traverse and inform nineteenth-century medical

discourse, there was no potential teratological evil that could not be traced back to

onanism: from the lowly headache, to full-out lunacy, the “undisciplined” relationship of

the self to the body and to pleasure is posited as the site of a potential undoing of the self

and indeed of society. What’s more, it is in and through the figure of the petit

masturbateur that Foucault will apperceive the elaboration and deployment of what he

calls the “interclass family model,” a key mode of positing the bourgeois nuclear family

127
Claude Jeancolas, Le Dictionnaire Rimbaud (Paris: Balland, 1991), p. 110. A reproduction of this
advertisement, which can be found in Murphy’s Rimbaud et la Commune, does indeed lend itself to a
parodically homoerotic readings, as the improbable device featured in the publicity looks something like a
cross between the fordist eating-machine from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and a S/M apparatus
designed for simulating felatio (see supra). Enghiens, as in the Duc d’…, also clearly has a political
resonance in the context of nineteenth-century French politics, as this was the infamous prince héritier of
the Bourbon throne assassinated in the 1820s.
128
See for instance Michel Foucault’s genealogical critique of the role this fundamental figure – i.e., of the
petit masturbateur – played in the dissemination of disciplinary norms of the body in Abnormal: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 55-81, 231-63.
129
William Peniston, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century
Paris (New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2004), p. 53.
 290

as the socio-sexual norm which both produces and polices this same norm’s deviant

other, the working class family.130 According to this model, produced in a massive body

of discourse on onanism and its perils in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the

bourgeois family was incited to keep as close a watch as possible on the bodies of its

children, to inspect them for the slightest signs of excessive, destructive desire. We have

here a sort of secularized model of the sin of the flesh, complete with a confessional

scene: should the parents discover signs of masturbation, the family doctor was called in

to hear the child’s confession, creating thus a family space of medicalized, saturated

sexuality. This insertion of sexuality into a discourse of power/knowledge also

contributes to the creation of the “cellular [bourgeois] family”. At base, it spatializes and

instantiates class difference, to the extent that supposedly lascivious, overly-sexualized

domestic servants, a constant in middle-class phantasms of the working-classes, were

either pushed out of the family space, or kept, along with children, under constant

surveillance. The discourse on masturbation undeniably contributes, then, to the

emergence and interrelation of nineteenth-century normative class, gender, and family

constructs, that is, the “affective family core” of the bourgeoisie, by urgently insisting on

the parents’ responsibility for the child’s welfare. Masturbation, as Foucault amply

demonstrates, was seen as a sort of omni-etiological evil, responsible for everything from

bone maladies to madness in passing by blindness (“Aveugles […] soyons chrétiens”

runs the last syntagm of Rimbaud’s sonnet).131

Amongst the working-classes, we find different ends and techniques being put

into place, though it is never a question of freedom or liberation from a watchful,

130
Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-1974 (New York:
Picador, 2006), p. 271.
131
Ibid., pp. 239, 245-9.
 291

normalizing gaze. The aim with respect to working-class sexuality is not “get close to

your children (…) observe their bodies closely. Rather, the theme is: distribute bodies

with the greatest possible distance between them (…). The essential thing is to prevent

the promiscuity (…) that could make incest possible.”132 In both these models, however,

we find the Oedipal threat of incest everywhere present, which is why it functions as an

“interclass” model for analyzing sexuality. However, desire, and the danger it provokes,

differs according to this discourse along class lines. Amongst the bourgeoisie “the child’s

sexuality is dangerous”; amongst the working-classes, “adult sexuality” is the problem.133

The solution promulgated by philanthropic campaigns in the nineteenth century was to

get the proletariat to marry. Mimetic conjugality was thought to be the perfect solution to

these loosely structured, floating populations about whom everything seemed, at least to

the degree that marriage is a form of social and communal organization, antisocial and

potentially dangerous. “Imitate the middle-class marriage (as much as possible),” became

the discourse on working-class family in the nineteenth century, to such an extent that we

see the rise of something we might call “coercive philanthropy” in mid-century – that is,

“charitable organizations which gave aid only to those legitimately married.”134

While such a hypothesis indeed contains a great deal of potential, especially when

positioned within the larger genealogical field of the production and social distribution of

norms, truth, and power at the end of the nineteenth century, Jeancolas swiftly shuts

down such possible readings by glossing “soyons chrétiens” as marking the moment

132
Ibid., pp. 270-1.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid., 269-270. Colin Heywood and William Sewell mention similar attempts at “moralizing” the
working classes in what they and Foucault call propaganda, but which seems more broadly like the spread
of a normative configuration throughout society. See Colin Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth century
France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 183-195; William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in
France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), pp. 217-236.
 292

when the poet perceives a limit that ought not be transgressed. “Arrêtons nos conneries

là,” as he puts it.135 Wallace Fowlie advances a no-doubt unintentionally ironic gloss on

the syntagm by detecting in it a call for the socio-political antagonisms of the post-

semaine-sanglante period to be dissolved in a kind of Christian brotherly love, or

agape.136 For reasons that will become clear momentarily, our reading will obviously

take a different approach.

I would like to take a slightly different guess at the semantic rather than the

syntactical logic at work in the last tercet. Reboul and Murphy are indeed right to propose

that the vocable, Aveugles!, in the 12th line should actually be read as forming a kind of

apostrophe to which the imperative of the 14th line, soyons chrétiens!, furnishes the

propositional complement. It should be noted that this syntactical formula nominalized

epithet + imperative 1st person plural actually constitutes a recurrent syntagma in

Rimbaud’s oeuvre and in at least one crucial instance from from “Matin,” in Une saison

en enfer (“Le chant des cieux, la marche des peuples! Esclaves, ne maudissons pas la

vie”), the memory of the Paris Commune and its lost promise quite clearly forms a

horizon of meaning in this poem. Indeed, the last paragraph of “Matin” mobilizes and

melancholically accumulates every possible trope of utopian socialism from the late

1860s-70s in an imaginary creation of the morning after the “grand soir” of revolution

where the poet bears witness to the “naissance du travail nouveau, la sagesse nouvelle, la

135
Claude Jeancolas, op. cit.
136
Wallace Fowlie, ed., Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1975), p. 125, cited in Murphy, op. cit., p. 242.
 293

fuite des tryans et des démons, la fin de la superstition, adorer – les premiers – Noël sur

terre!”137

The best readers of this poem have proposed that we read this imperative as a

kind of sarcastic warning that the newly installed, reactionary political regime in post-

Commune Paris was seeking a return to the Empire or worse, to the Monarchy.138 It is in

this light, for example, that many critics invite us to comprehend the reference to the

“sergents de ville,” the notorious police force of Second Empire Paris.139 In sum, this

reading argues, one would have to be blind not to see that a renewed collaboration of

politics and religion would be the new-old ideological order of the day. “Aveugles! (…)

soyons chrétiens!” would be a kind of parody of the hypocritical calls for a return to the

moral order exemplified by Catholic church as the best possible means of reconciling

post-Commune France to a new era of political consensus. The church was, after all, a

veritable regulator of disciplinary power up until the end of the nineteenth century,

relaying into the domestic sphere of the working classes the social and political norms of

the bourgeoisie.140 Such collaboration was exemplified in the increasing importance of

the Catholic Church as an auxiliary of power, controlling everything from access to

137
Arthur Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 277. See also, Adrian Rifkin, “No Particular Thing to Mean,” Block 8
(1983), pp. 42-3.; Alain Dalotel and Jean-Claude Freiermuth, “Socialism and Revolution,” in Voices of the
People: the Social Life of “La Sociale” at the End of the Second Empire, Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas,
eds. (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 235-60. See also Yves Reboul, op. cit.
138
Yves Reboul, op. cit., pp. 265-287 ; Steve Murphy, op. cit., pp. 197-242.
139
Despite being formally disbanded in the days following the collapse of the Second Empire by the decree
of 8 September, 1870, and replaced in theory by a civilian-controlled police force (the gardiens de la paix),
the sergents de la ville, taken as a metonymic representative of the Repressive State Apparatus, that is, as
the instance of regulative, persistent menace of violence monopolized by the State that maintains power in
place once it has formally constituted itself, are still not only a phantasmatic presence (in the sense of the
return of the repressed violence of the Commune, of the memory of the by-gone Empire, etc.), but, and this
is the meaning of its contiguity with the advertisement for thermal-cures (Enghiens chez soi!) it is actually
inscribed on the very surface of the city itself – a city whose wounds, whose traumatism, would have been
just as visible as a publicity one year after the Semaine Sanglante. See Yves Reboul, op. cit., p. 111
140
On this note, see any number of disciplinary texts written by philanthropists, welfare agents, prefects of
police, or capitalists such as Denis Poulot. Alain Cottereau, “Denis Poulot’s ‘Le Sublime’ – a preliminary
study of daily life and workers’ resistance in Paris in 1870,” in, Voices of the People, op. cit. pp. 97-168.
 294

welfare (especially after Haussmann’s turn towards a neo-Malthusian policy of

moralizing the working classes and restricting their access to state aid)141 to education,

under the Second Empire. Taken in this sense, the exhortation is a distinctly double-

sided, sarcastic commentary on post-Commune conservative political culture that the

poet posits as a direct ideological prolongation of the Second Empire. “We,” being

“blind” to the ideological mystifications that are elections and a formal change in

government, have failed to see that nothing has changed. In a kind of perverse eternal

return of the same the new masters are, in fact, the old masters: the Crown and the

Church (or the imperial abeille and the abbaye).

Ergo, “we” might as well resign ourselves to licking the new master’s boots in the

hopes of getting a bit of pain vieux (c.f., line 10-11, cirages onctueux). That is, the only

thing to do in the aftermath of the Commune is to resign oneself to a position of political

and economic domination in the hopes of being thrown symbolic, if decaying, crusts of

bread. Indeed, at the risk of a reductive paraphrase, the reading of the “aveugles” that

Reboul teases out, goes something like: “puis, qui sait,” anything is possible, even the

return of the Empire, so one might as well just get with the program, “aveugles, soyons

chrétiens”. In sum, Rimbaud would be adopting a servile posture so as to better

underscore its monumental absurdity.142

As astute as these analyses are, I wonder nevertheless if it’s really possible to

close the poem’s stream of potential significations with a monological stabilization of the

141
David Harvey, op. cit., 145, 207, 233, 237.
142
Yves Reboul, ibid., pp. 281-3. I would point out though, by way of preparing our own reading, that the
nature of the interrogative, “qui sait” is a highly dynamic one. As Benoît de Cornulier has pointed out, we
can take “qui sait?” as either a pure rhetorical question, or, more intriguingly, as a potentially critical
performative affirming that what is in question is not a foregone conclusion but that the most we can say
about “X” is that the opposite may not be a sure thing. See his splendid short essay, “Analyse énonciative
d’une question partielle rhétorique: ‘Qui sait?’, ” at http://www.normalesup.org/~bdecornulier/, last
accessed 02/20/2011.
 295

phrase “soyons chrétiens!”. Such a move is especially curious given the emphasis that

these critics appropriately place on what Ross Chambers has elsewhere called the “textual

function,” or the crucial role of the reader in treating the text not so much as a stabilized

instrumental structure of signification as the event of bringing to the surface the

duplicities (in the etymological sense) that allow one to “read” the multiple codes of

oppositionality to the cultural and political hegemony that slyly inform the text, that are

contained between its lines (in its inter-dits), so to speak.143

I wonder, in other words, if prevailing upon such a deeply cynical, almost

Flaubertian, vision of class relations is really the only way to secure meaning in a poem

that is otherwise deeply disturbed on its structural and referential planes. In one semantic

sense, undoubtedly the answer is an affirmative one. We can indeed read the final tercet

of “Paris” as a cynical send-off to formerly held beliefs. But, of course, if we put a bit of

pressure on the text, another reading becomes possible, and the interrogation of class

conflict contained in the sonnet becomes exponentially complex.

It’s slightly odd, for example, that Reboul adopts so categorical a tone when he

claims that the “aveugles” in the final tercet “n’ont rien de baudelairien”.144 Reboul

stakes this claim to the extent that these “aveugles” are supposed simply to designate the

“blindness” of Rimbaud’s contemporaries to the violence of the State, to the return of the

ancien régime, or, I would add, blindness to the revolutionary potential of the masses of

the marginalized and the exploited to change the coordinates of what is politically

possible. This last iteration of blindness is obviously linked to the others, and goes more

commonly under the name of “ideology”. But if, in the preceding quatrains, the tacit

143
See Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, op. cit., pp. 1-24.
144
Ibid., p. 286
 296

target of Rimbaud’s sarcasm is the bourgeoisie designated as a class through the

ideological apparatuses and the fetishes of consumer capitalism, then maybe these

“aveugles” are in fact distinctly Baudelairian (notice that in the first quatrain, we have

publicities for everything from shoes, hats, pianos, to socks for varicose veins, and in the

second, we find what Pascal Pia calls a deliberate disorder of names of writers,

journalists, and at least one notorious criminal).145 Such a reading simply requires that we

understand the ultimate lament of Baudelaire’s aveugles (“que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous

ces aveugles?”) as pointing towards the obfuscations of ideology and the sort of cecity it

creates within the structure of identity – the blindness of turning one’s eyes to the

145
Pascal Pia, ed., L’Album zutique (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962), p. 78. To sum up, Godillot –
whose name has itself come to designate shoes through a process of antonomasis – was an industrial
shoemaker who notably was commissioned to provision the French army (c.f. supra, p. 51); Gambier was
the name of a pipe brand (and its possible that “Jacob” was as well); Galopeau was a pedicurist for “well-
healed” Parisians; Wolf (or Volf) manufactured pianos; Menier (or perhaps Ménier, as Reboul suggests,
was a well-known actor) was the head of a chocolate company and was one of the richest men in France in
his time (he was elected to parliament in 1876); Le Perdriel made orthopedic stockings for varicose veins
(but in “la varice,” we can obviously hear a potentially mischievous homophone, “l’avarice”). In the second
quatrain, we find at first glance a chaotic juxtaposition of proper names, but beneath which lays a rather
methodical logic. Kinck was of course the Alsatian industrialist who, along with his family, was murdered
by Tropmann in one of the Second Empire’s final scandales (much more could be said about the
significance of this affaire, but it suffices to point out here that public confidence in the imperial regime,
which was already wavering after “liberalization measures” had been taken in the late 1860s, was shaken to
its core, essentially shattering the myth of the omniscient imperial spies/police (i.e., even the famous
sergents de ville could not prevent the massacre of a family that was taken as something of a metonym for
bourgeois normativity). Reboul points up that in some pro-Commune caricatures, such as those by Faustin,
Adolphe Thiers was represented in the guise of Tropmann. Indeed, in one famous caricature, Thiers’ head
is next to Tropmann’s in the head-restraint of a guillotine (we might say that their heads are thus about to
fall into a “panier de grâce”). Above their heads are the words, “La Dynastie des Tropmann: Tropmann I,
Tropmann II). It is thus highly significant that this name is immediately juxtaposed with that of Louis
Veuillot, an ultra-reactionary catholic journalist who applauded the repression of the Commune ( calling it
“une folie incomparable dans l’hisoire, un crime inoui!,”quite like Catulle Mendès who referred to the
Communards as “Erostrates de banlieu (…), Sardanaples ivres de vitriol.”); André Gill was of course a
famous caricaturist moderately sympathetic to the Commune, and, inversely, Guido Gonin, was something
of his antithesis – a caricaturist who published drawings that were violently hostile to the Commune and the
Communards. Bonbonnel was a colonial adventurer specializing in panther hunting, and Jacob was a
charlatan who claimed to be able to heal illness with the force of magnetism. As Murphy points out, Jacob
le Zouave was frequently compared (by Vallès’ employer, Henri de Rochefort, amongst others) to
politicians under the “liberal” Empire (i.e., to the extent that both exploited the naiveté of the poor). See
also, Yves Reboul, op. cit., p. 267; Murphy, op. cit., p. 214. See also, Louis Veuillot, Paris pendant les
deux sièges, Oeuvres completes, t. XIII (Paris: P. Lathielleux, 1927); and Catulle Mendès, Les 73 journées
de la Commune: du 18 mars au 29 mai (Paris: E. Lachaud, 1871).
 297

heavens as opposed to the ground, or, the material and historical conditions of one’s

exploitation.

For Marx, the primary effect of the commodity fetish is a mystification that

dismantles one’s sense of agency and of belonging to a larger community; it skews one’s

sense of self and of the relation to the other.146 Hence, and this is a detail that has been

unfortunately little-theorized in this poem, it is by no means totally coincidental that what

this “sonnet” takes as its raw material is the very material of commodity fetishism itself:

i.e., the publicity.

For all its weirdness, despite this riot of names that appears at first glance as a

kind of psychotic babbling, or, rather, precisely because of this apparent bizarreness,

“Paris” is a deeply revolutionary poem. Consider, for example, the materiality of the

publicity in nineteenth-century Paris. Its dimensions were often enormous, covering

whole sides of apartment buildings. Such is the case of this publicity, for a certain hat-

maker named L’Hérissé (covering fully four stories of the apartment building at the right

of the photograph taken in 1866 on the Quai des Orfèvres):

146
See, Karl Marx, op. cit., pp. 163-70.
 298

Charles Marville, photograph of the quai des orfèvres, detail.147

In deterritorializing the publicity, in managing to thus defamiliarize the everyday

space of the city with its unspoken (or infans) rules governing the rights of certain bodies

to occupy certain spaces, the poem “Paris” magnificently re-appropriates the space of the

city that the publicity had transformed into the private, atomized, and timeless affair of

consumption of mass-produced commodities. Such a transposition from one symbolic

147
Charles Marville, Marville, Paris (Paris: Hazan, 1995) pp. 30-1.
 299

and social space to another transforms the “commodity” into a site of dissensus, a site

where the transparent legibility of signs and the meanings of space and subjects are

contested and negotiated. Deterritorializing the publicity thus operates as a mode of

symbolic resistance to the constitution of the bourgeois sphere, which Rimbaud suggests,

as we shall see in a moment, is symbolically and literally predicated on acts of profound

violence and alienation, on the dissolution of the sense of collective agency.148

Furthermore, there is a meta-discursive, politically performative dimension to the

poem as well, one that serves as a kind of barometer of Rimbaud’s increasingly

revolutionary approach to classical poetic forms. First, consider the formally subversive

nature of the text. Although the rhyme scheme of the quatrains is constant, placing it

closer to the canonical form than to the sonnet libertin of which Rimbaud was something

of a master,149 the rhymes cut across one another, and their order is overthrown in the

shift from the first quatrain to the second, creating thus a kind of structural chiasmus.

Etymologically, a chiasmus is a “cross”. The formal structure of the text, which

“crucifies” the sonnet’s quatrains colludes in important ways with the poem’s multiple

and semantically ambivalent references to Christological figures.

Second, as Steve Murphy has pointed out, all of the rhymes in this sonnet are

masculine.150 Third, although from a metrical standpoint the sonnet is a highly plastic,

dynamic form,151 if we consider, along with Gretchen Schultz,152 the alexandrine as its

148
Such is, after all, the logic of the commodity “fetish” according to Marx: it replaces relations amongst
agents (i.e., social relations of production) with relations amongst things. See, Karl Marx, Capital, Volume
I (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), pp. 163-70.
149
Michel Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud (Paris: José Corti, 2002), pp. 198-212.
150
Steve Murphy, op. cit., p. 217.
151
This is indeed a point that de Banville underlines in his Traité, a few short lines after lamenting the fact
that Baudelaire nevertheless chose to include an unfortunate number of sonnets libertines in his Fleurs du
mal. Heterometrical sonnets are not absent from Les Fleurs du mal, for that matter. One thinks, for
example, of “La Musique,” a sonnet layé consisting of a metrical scheme alternating between alexandrines
 300

“traditional meter,” then perhaps we might theoretically think of the choice of hexameters

in “Paris” as the creation of a kind of phantasmagorical sonnet, almost in the

etymological sense of a form of speech that brings ghosts out into the open, transforming

the “closed” space of the poem into the open space of the agora, into a site of speech and

memory; we might consider it as a sonnet where precisely half of the syllables have been

lopped off. Furthermore, we ought not take such a gesture entirely for granted: post-

Commune cultural and literary politics, messing around with the sacred sonnet, or the

alexandrine, which for the likes of Brunetière and de Banville were the very markers of

French sophistication and tradition in poetry, was seen as culturally suspect, if not

politically revolutionary.153

What we see in this poem is Rimbaud grappling, as he did throughout the

previous year, with the sonnet and the alexandrine as ideological forms – forms that he

subverts here perhaps just as violently as in later poems such as “Qu’est-ce pour nous

mon coeur”. It’s possible, then, to see this mutilated sonnet as reproducing the

traumatized cityscape of Paris itself in the aftermath of a gruesome civil war marked by

bombardments, the destruction of monuments such as the Hôtel de Ville, the Vendôme

and hexameters. See Théodore de Banville, Petit traité de poésie francaise op. cit., p. 199; see also,
Ferdinand Brunetière, L’Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Librairie Hachette,
1910), p. 268-269.
My thanks to Seth Whidden and Steve Murphy for their helpful reminders and precisions on the flexibility
of the nineteenth-century sonnet.
152
Discussing Verlaine’s destabilization of the formal metric composition of the sonnet (i.e,. by writing in
enneasyllabic verse in “A la louange de Laure et Pétrarque”), Schultz writes: “[I]ts eleven-syllabe lines are
an affront to the alexandrine that Ronsard popularized in the sixteenth century and that the Parnassians later
engaged in their cult of form. When the sonnet regained favor in the nineteenth century, the alexandrine
was the line de rigueur used for its composition.” Schultz also reminds us that the sonnet was the “form
most valued by the Parnassians,” and Murphy suggests that the alexandrine was the prototypical verse for
the form in the nineteenth century. Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in
Nineteenth-Century Poetry (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), p. 224. My emphasis. See
also, Steve Murphy, “Musset, ‘quatorze fois exécrable’?: lecture méthodique d’un ‘Sonnet’,” Études
françaises 41:3 (2005), p. 85.
153
Théodore de Banville, op. cit., p. 199 ; Ferdinand Brunetière, op. cit., p. 268-269.
 301

Column, and the Tuileries, to say nothing of course of the tens of thousands of Parisians

butchered in the streets by their fellow countrymen in the space of a single, brutal week.

In sum, there’s a kind of passage à l’acte in this poem where the French lyrical model as

such is submitted to a form of symbolic revolutionary violence that repeats, as it were,

the very real violence of class-warfare that had so recently ravaged the city of Paris. In

Rimbaud’s “Paris,” the sonnet, which we might take as a metonym of French lyrical

poetry is submitted to death by a thousand punctuational cuts (there is a total of 37

punctemes in a text fourteen lines long, including seven dashes). However, if the violence

meted out to the sonnet in some sense repeats, in a mode of displacement, the real

violence (or the violence of the real of class warfare) that had recently disfigured the city

of Paris, thereby symbolically resisting the dominant class’s injunction to forget the

Commune, there is also a second kind of resistance at work in “Paris” which is opposed

not only to the perspective of the “eternal return of the same” in politics, but perhaps to

something which might be even worse – namely, the reign of capital.

More than a foreboding sense of the return of the old regimes of the Empire or the

Monarchy, there’s perhaps the indication in this poem that something slightly more

insidious coincided with the crushing of the Commune: the finally unfettered reign of the

same class that crushed the Commune, the bourgeoisie. What renders this regime more

insidious is how the dominant class manages to complicate the question of “resistance”.

Under capitalism there is, on the one hand, hardly any challenge or opposition to the

system that cannot be co-opted or transformed into a part of its general functioning and

reproduction. On the other hand, the theoretical question of resistance itself is

complicated by the practical problem: resist what? Class domination in the era of market
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capitalism isn’t located in a specific figure, or master-signifier, of authority such as a

prince or an emperor, but rather is dispersed – it saturates, envelopes, and circulates in the

lives, ideas, and desires (i.e., the “ruse” of ideology is that it becomes an unconscious

structure of the self) of those who live under its rule – which is a rule that seeks always to

pass itself off as neutral, consensual, as an apolitical, private affair. Even if power

relations are always contingent, always subject to unpredictable modifications, that is,

even if they are the very condition of possibility of “resistance,”154 they are nevertheless,

as Ross Chambers puts it, largely unspoken, taking place at the level of the unconscious –

at the level of what we can call an infantia.155 The genius of this poem lies precisely in its

at-first-glance mystifying juxtaposition of seemingly incommensurable heterogeneities –

a strategic kind of writing that, by installing a monumentally disruptive absence at the

very heart of what in terms of enunciation is supposed to designate pure presence, or

extra-linguistic reference, forces us to ponder over the sheer opacity of its “Names”.156

What do a Tropmann or a Mendès have to do with a hat-maker or an industrial shoe

manufacturer? Potentially quite a lot, as it turns out – if we recall for example that in

1871, Tropmann, would have been immediately legible to your average Parisian as both

an infamous serial-killer, but also as a figure of Adolphe Thiers, to whom he was

frequently compared in anti-versaillais caricatures (the brilliantly understated suggestion

154
As Michel Foucault aptly and repeatedly reminds us. See, inter alia, “Précisions sur le pouvoir –
réponses à certaines critiques,” in Dits et Écrits II, 1976-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 631-2.
155
Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 11. Referring to this level of pre-linguistic operations
of ideology, Chambers indeed uses the term in-fans, the child.
156
But then again, there’s a kind of theoretical coherence here too: for in strictly functional terms, a nom
propre, quite like the poetic axis of language according to Jakobson, is auto-referential – it only ever
signifies its own instance, its own lack of semantic determination, the void at the center of the signifier and
at the heart of the subject. See, for example, Emile Benveniste, “La Nature des pronoms,” in Problèmes de
linguistique générale, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 251-7. See also, Jean Dubois et. al., Dictionnaire de
linguistique (Paris: Larousse, 2001), s.v., “ propre ” ; and Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale
(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963), pp. 209-21.
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here is that Thiers, as a metonym of the bourgeoisie, is a mass-murderer).157 Catulle

Mendès, and countless others amongst the French literati,158 applauded the May

massacres, the ultimate aim of which was to save the Nation from socialism (or

civilization from barbarians, criminals, and animals, if you prefer to put it in the

biopolitical, or thanatopolitical terms of anti-Communard discourse). Indeed, the aim of

the semaine sanglante was to make the capital finally safe for capitalism – for the

unhindered production and circulation of commodities. Hence, I propose to see in “Paris”

a kind of vertiginous economy of litotes, of saying less (almost nothing, coming close to

a kind of poetic infancy in fact)159 in order to arrive at a distinctly communard critique of

class and politics in post-semaine sanglante France. In sum, the internal logic of the text

is that, at base, there’s nothing innocent or natural about the system of capitalism: the

political and discursive disqualification of the Commune, the transformation of the

communards into so many homines sacri, could never have been possible without the

collaboration of the Parisian literati, who functioned as ideological bloodhounds for the

dominant classes with whose economic and political interests they profoundly identified.

Why not give the last word here to Leconte de Lisle, whose diagnosis of the semaine

sanglante is typical? Writing to that other “impassible,” José-Maria de Hérédia, in the

157
Steve Murphy was the first to identify the importance of this caricature by Faustin in his Stratégies de
Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 230.
158
See Paul Lidsky’s Les Écrivains contre la Commune (Paris: La Découverte, 1999) for a sense of just
how prevalent a virulently anti-democratic sentiment was amongst virtually all of the authors nowadays
considered canonical.
159
Indeed, this weird, tohu-bohu mingling of proper nouns goes so far beyond normative grammar, logic,
and semantics as to approach a kind of anal babbling, or zero-degree of sense. It thereby comes close to the
sort of ideologico-semiotic deformation that poses a serious challenge to the principle of ideology’s
capacity to operate and signify that Julia Kristeva locates at the heart of every revolutionary poetic practice.
For Kristeva, the semiotic is “transversal to the sign, syntax, denotation, and signification (…). We imagine
it in the cries, the vocalizing, the gestures of infants; it functions, in fact, in adult discourse as rhythm,
prosody, plays on words, the non-sense of sense, laughter.” See Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage
poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974), pp.14, 78,
and Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 14, cited in Naomi Schor, “Female Paranoia: The
Case for Psychoanalytic Feminism,” in Yale French Studies 62 (1981), p. 211. My italics.
 304

immediate aftermath of the massive bloodshed of the Commune’s repression, de Lisle

breathes a sigh of metaphorical relief for civilization (i.e., for his class): “Enfin, c’est fini.

J’espère que la répression sera telle que rien ne bougera plus, et, pour mon compte, je

désirerais qu’elle fût radicale.”160

By displacing and emptying-out the signifiers of the “new regime” in the capital,

that is, the reign of the bourgeoisie, and of the signifiers of capital, “Paris” also

commemorates and symbolically re-enacts what is often taken as the single most

theoretically significant aspect of the Commune, namely, the occupation of the public

sphere, of the center of Paris, by the demos, by the sans-part of (the) capital. 161 Against

historians, such as Roger Gould,162 who seek to minimize the importance of this

disturbance in the topography of inequality as a relatively minor aspect of the Commune,

and who thus, perhaps not entirely despite themselves, prolong into the present a core

feature of anti-communard discourse which consisted in depoliticizing the revolution that

took place in Paris, we should briefly rehearse what the main stakes and consequences

were of that central phenomenon of urban modernity known as Haussmannization.

First, it is well known that Haussmann’s aims in destroying the vieux Paris were

multiple, combining a disciplinary logic of spatial organizations and exclusions with

hygienic and esthetic concerns (and in this respect, we might say that the politics of the

esthetic are not solely conceptual, but rather radically pragmatic – they are inscribed on

the surface of a boulevard, or in the material used to construct a house, or in the

distribution of bodies that results from the phenomenon of rising rents and compressed

160
“Letter to J.M. de Hérédia,” 29 May, 1871, cited in P. Lidksy, op. cit., p. 76.
161
See especially, Henri Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune: 26 Mars, 1871 (Paris: Gallimard,
1965).
162
Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the
Commune (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
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wages). The general thrust, however, was to make the capital a place where capitalism

could (and did) flourish. That is, the logic subtending the creation of the tyrannie de la

ligne droite of the grands boulevards isn’t just one informed by military tactics, they also

allowed for a more fluid circulation of commodities, capital, and labor. Haussmann’s

urban renewal plans also point to the historical creation of important systems of credit.

The founding of credit institutions such as the Credit Lyonnais and the Société Générale

during the Second Empire allowed Haussmann’s projects to take place, keep

unemployment relatively stable, and, thanks to real-estate speculation and good-old

fashioned fraud and corruption, happened to make select members of the bourgeoisie

incredibly wealthy in the process, transforming them into a veritable aristocratie de la

finance.163

What all of this entailed, however, were two things: one, the space of the city, its

boulevards, promenades, cafés and grands-magasins ceased to be perceived as common

space, but rather as distinctly classed space, a private space belonging to the bourgeoisie,

closed even if ontologically open to all.164 For David Harvey, this is the underlying logic

at work in Baudelaire’s “Les Yeux des pauvres”. Of course the poet’s paramour can

(successfully) ask for the waiter to chase away the disturbing gaze of the poor

contemplating a world of luxury from which they are not only excluded, but which

depends upon their poverty as its very condition of possibility, for its very constitution.

There’s no paradox, or, within the frame of an unjust partage du sensible, any injustice in

163
Saccard, from Zola’s La Curée, is in this sense an allegorically quintessential figure of Second Empire
Paris.
164
Films such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine remind one that this sense of total exclusion of the demos
from the space of the city is a legacy of Haussmann’s that is still with us. There’s perhaps no single better
illustration of this socio-economic appropriation of urban space by the bourgeoisie than Gustave
Caillebotte’s eerily empty and subtly violent (more space than we have here would be need to elaborate on
the disfigured and fragmented working-class bodies in the background of this work) 1877 tableau, Rue de
Paris, temps de pluie, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago.
 306

this act of symbolic act of repression to the extent that even the open, shared space of a

Parisian sidewalk is still a bourgeois interior space.165 There is simply the affirmation

that, in the socio-spatial partage du sensible of the Second Empire, the poor occupy no

space within the city – they are, strictly speaking, sans-part and sans-lieu. “Control over

space,” writes Harvey, is fundamentally a form and “source of social power”166: it is the

power to reproduce space, society, class, and the hidden-in-plain sight hierarchies,

practices and effects of domination that keep the infernal machine functioning.

Coextensive with this reconfiguration of spatial regimes as a kind of private

property, was a topographic, demographic, economic, and political marginalization of the

working classes. No longer able to afford rent in Paris, they were forced out of the

potentially valuable real estate they had (unproductively) occupied in the center of the

City and pushed out to the slums and poorer neighborhoods on the periphery of the city,

segregated from the affluence of (the) capital in the new suburbs of Belleville,

Batignolles and so on. The (historical) irony of this emptying-out of the classes

dangereuses from the center of the capital is that, on the one hand, it manages to

reproduce class difference in a material dimension – by physically pushing the poor out

of the city, Haussmannisation simultaneously classifies spaces and spatializes class. On

the other hand, because sociopolitical and urban exclusion was based on class difference

to begin with, Haussmann’s projects also managed to create the conditions for the

emergence of a collective identity along class affiliations. In a word, the very exclusion

of the working classes from the center of the city, seen as a solution to the problem of the

political aspirations of the proletarians, was also the occasion of their coming together as

165
David Harvey, op. cit., p. 275.
166
Ibid., p. 239.
 307

political subjects, as subjects capable of making political utterances and articulating

demands for equality. As Harvey puts it, “the reoccupation of central Paris by the popular

classes (…) took on such symbolic importance” precisely because it occurred as an

interruption of the self-evidence of that class’s sociosymbolic marginalization during the

regime of Napoléon III, as a demonstration of that class’s capacity to think, theorize, and

talk politics.167 In this sense, the proclamation of the Commune, and with it the

reoccupation of the space of the city by the working-classes, is an instance of what

Rancière calls the scandal of democracy: the scandal of the creation of equality, of

“shift[ing] a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination (…)

mak[ing] heard a discourse where once there was only a place for noise” or silence,

infantia.168

Thanks to Céline Braconnier’s excellent archival work on seditious graffiti in

post-Commune Paris, we know for certain that the police were particularly concerned

with frequent denunciations of their presence in working-class quarters of the city. In one

such instance gleaned from a pissotière across from the École Militaire, the police are

explicitly referred to as chergos, an argotic deformation of sergents (as in our “sergents

de ville”).169 Perhaps, then, this specific political critique targeting the police was more

common, more generalized, in 1871 than it might at first glance appear. In Braconnier’s

view, the écriture sauvage of graffiti constituted an important form of collective writing

and re-appropriation of socio-symbolic space from its normative, hegemonic neutrality in

1870s Paris. It transformed the spatial organization of the city into a visual surface of

167
Ibid., p. 276.
168
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), p. 30.
169
Céline Braconnier, “Braconnages sur terres d’état. Les inscriptions séditieuses dans le Paris de l’après-
Commune, 1872-1885,” Génèses 35 (juin, 1999), p. 118-19.
 308

conflict and commentary upon which dissenting words illicitly circulated as so many

unfinished texts silently soliciting further comment, further speech, further laughter. It

should come as no surprise that, after he had managed to isolate and antagonize even

some of the members of the Cercle Zutique, Rimbaud apparently took to this more

radical form of appropriating public space as a space of collective commentary, tagging

the walls of the Café de Cluny with the following parodic fragments (signed Albert

Mérat) in which the link to the Commune, and indeed to the sonnet “Paris” is evident:170

“Vers pour les lieux”

De ce siège si mal tourné
Qu’il fait s’embrouiller nos entrailles,
Le trou dut être maçonné
Par de véritables canailles
Albert Mérat, 1872

Quand le fameux Tropmann détruisit Henri Kink

Cet assassin avait dû s’asseoir sur ce siège
Car le con de Badingue et le con d’Henri V
Sont bien dignes de cet état de siège171

In both quatrains, there’s a polysemic play around the signifier “siège,” which

obviously could refer scatologically to the public toilettes where the poems where

written, or, of course, could be (and fairly easily for a Parisian in 1872) as a reference to

the siege of Paris by both the Prussians and the Versaillais government (both sieges, of

course, ironically ont tourné mal – that is, one led to another and, finally, to the

Commune). At the excipit of the second quatrain, the suggestion seems to be, much more

explicitly than in “Paris” that neither the Empire nor the Monarchy, nor the bourgeoisie

170
Here’s how Verlaine, writing in 1883 to Charles Morice, a rare friend of the poet who didn’t disavow
his ties to Verlaine even when his reputation couldn’t have been worse, describes the following graffiti-
poems: “(…) je vous donne – quel cadeau! – par-dessus le marché deux quatrains scatologiques (Est-ce le
mot?) dont le premier a longtemps figuré avec la signature d’Albert Mérat sur le mur du numéro 100 du
Café de Cluny.” No doubt, these quatrains were written on the wall of the toilets, whence the slyly ironic
ambiguity around the term scatologique, potentially referring to both Mérat and the quality of his poetry.
Both the letter and the para-poems are cited in, Marcelin Pleynet, Rimbaud et son temps (Paris: Gallimard,
2005), pp. 86-7.
171
Arthur Rimbaud, “Ver pour les lieux,” in Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p. 186.
 309

are quite “propre” – they’re good for the “chiottes,” in other words (Henri V, the bourbon

pretender to the throne in 1872, ominously rhymes quite richly with Henri Kink, the

Alsatian industrialist who was Troppmann’s victim).172

As in “Paris,” we witness in these graffito poems a democratic circulation of

critical, licentious, criminal discourse that reconfigures the heretofore neutral space of the

city into an active surface for inscriptions and memory, and that in essence contains

nearly all of the central topoi of the Album zutique: parody, homoeroticism, political

critique, and the defamiliarization of space.

“Paris”’s displacement into poetry of the publicity brings about a kind of

désoeuvrement of the libidinal economy of capitalism, its rudimentary ability to elicit and

channel the potential force of desire into the ideological mechanism of its material

reproduction. The poem subverts the economic, normative circuits of semiotic exchange,

both undermining and underscoring language’s signifying power, its fundamental role in

the constitution and reproduction of hegemony, of the absolute self-evident sense of what

is possible to imagine in a society’s spaces, practices, and relations.

Thus if the text has a poetic method, it is that of an anti-capitalist poetics

suspending the Name/publicity’s capacity to interpolate subjects’ desires, thereby

complicating capital’s basic symbolic and imaginary capacity to reproduce itself. For

what is, at base, a poem if not a symbolic practice undermining the exchange value of

language, of language folding in the most non-pragmatic way possible onto itself? In a

172
Let us not forget that Jean-Baptiste Clément’s “La Canaille” was the unofficial anthem of the Commune
– and that the “trou” that must have been drilled in the walls separating one toilet stall from another refer to
the fact that public toilettes were frequently cruising grounds for gay encounters. Laure Murat points out in
her study of gender norms in nineteenth-century France that the toilettes in Les Halles had to be repaired on
a nearly daily basis for precisely this reason. See Laure Murat, La Loi du genre: une histoire culturelle du
troisième sexe (Paris: Fayard, 2006).
 310

way that is not without anticipating Duchamp’s ready-mades, what this transposing of,

say, the mark of a brand of chocolate or of a piano or of orthopedic stockings does is

make it impossible for these brands to function on their own, alienating terms as

enticements to consume goods that are endowed with a fetishistic power. Rather, in this

poem, they form a kind of neutral, or zero degree of sense, a background against which it

becomes possible, and even necessary, to re-imagine their possible meanings, and

perhaps to apperceive the relations of power that they occult.

VII. Soyons donc chrétiens?

The precise status of the poem’s final “name,” chrétiens, remains to be

interrogated. What sense can we attribute to the imperative at the poem’s excipit, “soyons

chrétiens!”? As we previously noted, this injunction has been read as either something

very close to Marx’s ironic remark on the repetition of History,173 of the eternal return of

the political same, or as the adoption of a resigned attitude of melancholic realism when

faced with the irremediable loss of one’s illusions and ideals – a defeatism that would be

contemporaneous with a putative adieu au politique in Rimbaud’s oeuvre. The question

is compelling, for nothing should seem so odd to us under Rimbaud’s pen as this

exhortation. In so far as the semantic value of the figure of Christ, or of that little

metonym of ideology that is the nineteenth-century provincial curé, in Rimbaud’s early

verse work is concerned, literary critics are indeed right to lean decidedly towards the

conclusion that this imperative is one that is saturated with bitter sarcasm.

173
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon. See also, Steve Murphy, Stratégies de
Rimbaud (Paris: Champion Classiques, 2009), pp. 189-240; and Yves Reboul, op. cit.
 311

Perhaps, though, we might think about the figure of Christ as a semiotic

battleground upon which conservatives and republicans (and especially socialists)

struggled over the precise semantic content that this figure was to convey and the sorts of

social relations it was meant to designate. Indeed, the Christic figure is a highly unstable

and polyvalent one in the Rimbaldian corpus, signifying, according to context, different

and indeed occasionally diametrically opposed things.

In the interest of avoiding a tendentious reading of this figure, we might

underscore that from the very first texts to the very last the figure of Christ, and, in a

larger sense, Christianity (often metonymically designated by the figure of the priest), is a

negatively charged one.174 It functions as an ideologeme, a kind of discursive shorthand

pointing to the moral hypocrisy of the provincial bourgeoisie, the cognitive bankruptcy

(or, in Marxist terminology, the lack of class-consciousness) of the poor, the corruption

of (childhood) innocence, and the sadistic obscenity of the Law (divine or secular).175 If

we survey the figure of “Christ,” or the curé, or “Christianity” as an isotopia in

Rimbaud’s early work, we’d be hard pressed indeed to find an example of this discursive

174
In collections of Rimbaud’s verse work in French, the opening poem after “Sensation” (which we might
read as a kind of re-working of “Demain dès l’aube,” from Victor Hugo’s Contemplations) is traditionally
a long series of alexandrins that the poet addressed in May of 1870 to the “cher Maître” of Parnassus,
Théodore de Banville, along with a letter in which Rimbaud, in a particularly Hugolian moment of
(calculated?) transport, swears to “adorer toujours les deux déesses, Muse et Liberté”. The title of the
poem, in which one cannot fail to hear a deeply subversive transformation of the Catholic Church’s Credo
in Unum Deum, is “Credo in Unam…”
175
See especially, “Les poètes de sept ans,” “Le mal,” “Les pauvres à l’église,” and “Les premières
communions” - which opens with “ Vraiment c’est bête, ces églises des villages/ où quinze laids marmots
(…) écoutent grasseyant les divins babillages, ” and closes on “ Christ ! O Christ, éternel voleur des
énergies ”) in Arthur Rimbaud, op. cit., pp. 125-6, 92, 133, 143-47, respectively. There is, furthermore, a
truly audacious and hilarious use of enjambment in the seventh sizain of this poem, where Rimbaud
deploys the compositional possibilities of poetic form (that is, enjambment and rhyme scheme) as such in
order to portray the rather odious and perverse priest figure as seized by the desire, en dépit des célestes
défenses, to dance when he’s alone at night. Scandalous enough on its own. But, as Murphy points out, the
payoff comes in the rhymes at lines 38 and 41: “Quand (…) Marquant.” Rimbaud’s priest is dancing the
“Can-Can” – a dance that the Catholic Church frowned upon to say the least. See Murphy, Le Premier
Rimbaud, op. cit.
 312

configuration that is not alternately portrayed as an insidious éternel voleur(s) d’énergie,

a fundamental apparatus of socio-political domination (what we’d today call an

ideological state apparatus), or as a grotesque parody of power that ultimately evokes a

carnavalesque laughter, radically complicating at the imaginary level of ideology and

identifications the ability to take seriously, the figures of the Church, Christ, and the

curé.176 In sum, amongst the works that date from the period of the année terrible, we

notice that the polemical and parodic strategies targeting the church or the figure of

Christ constitute one of the more consistent means by which Rimbaud situates his

discursive affiliation with the political, indeed socialist, opposition to the Second Empire

and to bourgeois society.177

In this respect, Rimbaud’s verse (and arguably later) poetry very much bears the

mark of late-nineteenth-century anti-clericalism, the kind of which could be found in no

short supply in journals that Rimbaud would have been able to read (we know, for

example, that he read La Charge, and in a letter to Paul Demeny, he mentions reading

Vallès’s Le Cri du peuple in the winter of 1871).178 The Catholic Church, again through

176
Such examples are indeed a constant in Rimbaud’s poetry in verse from 1870-71. To cite but a few very
well known examples, see “Credo in unam,” “Les pauvres à l’église,” “Les premières communions,”
“Accroupissements,” “Les poètes de sept ans,” and the short story, Un Coeur sous une soutane.
177
See Steve Murphy, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, op. cit.
178
“Les choses du jour étaient Le mot d’ordre et les fantaisies, admirables, de Vallès et de Vermersch au
Cri du peuple.” (The use of the term fantaisies in describing Vallès’s journal could eventually provide a
helpful framework for thinking, on the one hand, about the paratextual element in the title of the poem “Ma
bohème - fantaisie,” and, on the other, perhaps help us to re-read the text as a kind of social fantasy.)
Arthur Rimbaud, “Lettre à Paul Demeny, 17 avril, 1871,” in Oeuvres Complètes, op. cit., p. 339. It’s indeed
possible to detect something of a vallésian verve in a passage from the letter of 13 May, 1871 where
Rimbaud evokes the need for the artist to “[s’]encrapuler le plus possible”. In an article entitled “Lettre à
Ferragus,” Vallès adopts a similar lexicon in a passage that melds revolution with travail sur soi,
inextricably intermingling politics and esthetics: “Ils restent toute leur vie dans les régions de l’idéal
classique, disent, comme Brid’Oison; la fooorme: ils ont peur tout simplement de s’encanailler, ces
‘démocrates’. S’encanailler ? Je ne leur demande point ce sacrifice ; mais il est temps, ce me semble, que
l’art devienne démocratique (…). Je dis cela pour tous, philosophes, romanciers, sculpteurs ou peintres. ”
See Meciej Zurowksi, “Le poète comme multiplicateur de progrès,” L’Esprit nouveau dans tous ses états.
Hommage à Michel Décaudin (Paris : Minard, 1986), pp. 137-143 ; Antoine Fongaro, “Rimbaud et Vallès,”
 313

the metonymic figure of the “curé,” is increasingly ferociously denounced in the

politically infused satirical texts of 1870-71 for its collusion with the Second Empire’s

repression of working-class movements. In section IV of the 1864 Syllabus Errorum (the

Syllabus of Errors), the Papacy singles-out “socialism, communism, secret societies,

biblical societies, clerico-liberal societies” as grave errors of modernity to be condemned

and combated by the Church and her faithful. 179 Of course, denunciations of the Catholic

Church’s collusion with political powers constitutes something of a cliché in republican

discourse going back to the time of the first French Revolution, with the most notable

example in public discourse being Jacques Hébert’s ultra-montagnard journal Le Père

Duchesne, in the 44th issue of which an article appeared on the front page entitled “Le

Pape au foutre” (the article appeared in 1790, i.e., well before the turn towards political

terror, which saw a correlative intensification of the anti-clerical invective in Hébert’s

journal).180

In the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church was promoted as an imperative

auxiliary of the State for moralizing the working classes, principally through various

forms of economic coercion touching on access to economic and housing assistance. As

H.A. Frégier noted in 1840, reforming the penal institutions could only go so far, whence

no doubt the interest of Frégier’s study for Michel Foucault (fully half of the second tome

of Frégier’s Des classes dangereuses is dedicated to the failures and need for further

reform of French prisons). Deploying a martial rhetoric, Frégier argues that what was

Autour de Vallès 11, (décembre, 1990), p. 39 ; Jules Vallès, Œuvres Complètes, tome 1, Roger Bellet, ed.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 881..
179
See, http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P9SYLL.HTM. Consulted, 03/31/10.
180
See, http://www.archive.org/stream/lepreduchesnedh01hbgoog/lepreduchesnedh01hbgoog_djvu.txt,
consulted 05/01/10. For an English translation see,
http://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/hebert/1790/pope.htm.
 314

needed was an active offense on the front of “morality,” the type of which only the

church was capable of effectively waging: “Pour le moment, confessons que les remparts

du monde moral sont à moîtié démantelés, et que le clergé, sa milice naturelle, peut seul

les réparer et les affermir”.181

No less a voice than Victor Hugo was one of the very first to rise up and

denounce, in the aftermath of the 1851 coup d’état, the perniciously effective collusion of

the Catholic Church in legitimizing the new Imperial regime.182 Indeed, Hugo heaps no

small dose of scorn in Histoire d’un crime, and again later in Les Châtiments, on the

archbishop of Paris. Msg. Sébor earns Hugo’s opprobrium for choosing to sing a Te

Deum in honor of the overthrow of the République de l’Ordre Moral instead of imitating

his predecessor, Msg. Affre, who got himself shot on the barricades of the Faubourg St.

181
H.A. Frégier, Des classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes et des moyens de les
rendre meilleures, T. II (Paris : J.B. Baillière, 1840), p. 232. The final chapter of the first tome is dedicated
to the same topic (i..e, the usefulness of the Church as a kind of ideological prophylaxis for controlling the
working-classes). More remains to be said on the State-Finance nexus at work here, for, as Marx might
argue, the functioning of dispositifs of disciplinary power in many ways tend towards normalizing, towards
making “unproblematically” acceptable, a certain configuration of the spatio-temporal coordinates of
everyday life: i.e., that of the “normal working day”. A Marxo-Foucaultian analysis of the interactions of
state and private philanthropy might help us to comprehend how these two worked in conjunction, and to
the benefit, of the consolidation of industrial Capital and of the political and economic power of the
bourgeoisie. Let us take the brief example of subsidized housing. On the one hand, the disciplinary logic at
work in, say, Canler, or Villermé, or Frégier is one of normalizing behaviors: working-class households,
the not-inaccurate logic ran, would begin to act and think differently to the extent that they would be
property owners a little like the bourgeoisie – they would be less inclined to go on strike and even less to
join the working-classes on the barricades in times of revolt. However, increased state-aid in the form of
housing subsidies – of which Napoléon III was a strong proponent (see his, L’Elimination du paupérisme) –
which could and did help improve the living conditions of some sectors of the working class (and did
reduce the risk of their participation in riots or revolutions) had the ultimate overall effect of lowering
wages for that class as a whole (that is, making their living-standards dependent on the lack of crisis within
the economic system – never a wise bet, obviously) because the logic ran, an important commodity
expense had just been removed from the list of necessities required to allow them to reproduce their labor-
power. See Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, op. cit. chp. 10.
182
But Hugo was by no means alone. Even if he was infinitely less well-known than the author of Les
Misérables, Marx was also very quick to pick up, point out, and denounce how, under the reign of
Historical irony that was the Second Empire, the Catholic church was reduced to a disciplinary/ideological
auxiliary of government: “The priest then appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police –
another idée napoléonienne.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire…, op. cit., pp. 130-31.
 315

Antoine during the June 1848 uprising.183 Of course, Hugo judiciously and perhaps

understandably decides to elide the fact that, during those fateful June days, he personally

led a number of charges against the barricades that the Parisian proletariat erected when

the Assemblée decided to close the Ateliers Nationaux and thrust thousands of workers

simultaneously into unemployment and onto the barricades. Indeed, it seems that

Rimbaud, for all his admiration of Hugo, and there is no doubt that Les Châtiments

served as an important esthetico-political model for Rimbaud in 1870, was keenly able to

go beyond Hugo’s ideologically self-serving political relativism at the moment of the

semaine sanglante184 to the heart of a problem that Hugo remains particularly incapable

of acknowledging – that of class conflict.

In at least one highly complex tour de force of political and poetic satire,185 the

Christ-figure under Rimbaud’s pen functions not only as a parodic deflation of Victor

Hugo’s at times bombastic messianic complex,186 but also as a rather pointed and bitter

critique of Hugo’s refusal to mitigate or even attempt to preemptively avoid the violent

retribution exacted upon Paris and its citizens by publically intervening on behalf of the

183
“Si M. Sébour avait été M. Affre et s’était jeté au-devant les balles des prétoriens,” as he puts it in
Histoire d’un crime. See, Victor Hugo, Écrits Politiques, op. cit., p. 182. See also, the poems “Nox and “Le
te deum du 1er janvier 1852” in Les Châtiments (Paris: Flammarion 1998), pp. 57-72, 83-84.
184
Hugo famously wrote in Le Rappel that the Commune was a good thing done badly, before going on to
claim that “Depuis le 18 mars, Paris est mené par des inconnus, ce qui n’est pas bon, mais par des
ignorants, ce qui est pire (…) [un] mauvais choix de moment, mauvais choix des hommes.” Indeed, what
Rancière calls the “scandal of democracy” could not be better resumed than by Hugo’s appraisal of the
Commune, for its problem was precisely that of democracy – the government of those who are “poorly
chosen,” who have no title to govern. Victor Hugo, Écrits politiques, op. cit., pp. 286-89.
185
The poem, of which only a fragment is extant, written sometime in 1872 known as “L’Homme juste”.
See on this text, Steve Murphy’s characteristically excellent decryption, “Architecture, astronomie,
balistique: le châtiment de Hugo,” in Parade Sauvage, colloque 5: Vies et poétiques de Rimbaud, S.
Murphy, ed. (Charleville-Mézières: Imprimerie Anciaux, 2005).
186
In 1854, writing to his editor, Hugo would note that he had already begun to “los[e] the character of a
man to take on that of a priest or apostle.” Cited in Priscilla P. Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the
Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 154.
 316

Communards before or at the moment of the semaine sanglante.187 This penchant for

comparing himself to Jesus Christ is especially pronounced in Hugo’s, if not the

nineteenth century’s, masterpiece of poetico-political satire and protest, published in the

first years of the poet’s exile from France, Les Châtiments. In a poem from the second

section of this work entitled “Au peuple,” Hugo, in antonomastically addressing the

“peuple” as “Lazare” and formulating the imperative “lève-toi,” invariably equates

himself with Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to

conclude that references to Victor Hugo in Rimbaud suggest that the relation of the latter

to the former are easy to determine and classify under the register of something like a

whole-sale rejection of poetic tradition in favor of “absolute modernity” in poetry.

Rather, if Rimbaud’s at times sardonic satires of Hugo’s person and corpus perhaps

suggest the very real existence of the “anxiety of influence” and, at the very real and

dangerous risk of psychologizing the dead, perhaps Hugo is something like, if not an

idealized father-figure-cum-poetic-superego, then something like the “name of the

Father” for the young Rimbaud. Taking a slightly different perspective, we might argue

that, like Freud, Marx and Nietzsche for Foucault, Victor Hugo is, on a structural level of

discursivity (i..e, what makes certain statements or discursive practices possible, what

differentiates one set of statements or practices from another, etc.), an “initiator of

187
Realistically speaking, it’s of course historically improbable that any public posturing by Hugo would
have had the slightest moderating effect whatsoever on an army corps that was not only out for blood,
convinced that their mission was to save France from future revolutions by eradicating in one foul-sweep
the biopolitical menace of the socialist left, but over which, as has been suggested, civilian authority had
lost control. See supra, p. 284, note 120. It is more likely, as Murphy himself suggests, that the real bone of
contention, for Rimbaud, lies with Hugo’s attempt to lump all of the victims of the “terrible year” together
in a politically undifferentiated mass of misérablisme – a mass in which Hugo includes himself, having
been “victimized” by a crowd of reactionary royalists in Brussels that broke the windows of his home there
when he generously opened his doors to communards fleeing a fate of sure-death or deportation on the
other side of the border. On this and Hugo’s tendency towards “angélisme,” see, inter alia, his collection of
poems, L’Année terrible.
 317

[poetic] practices,” that is, an “author-function” making different discourses possible.188

Hence, it may be in some sense normal that Hugo’s preponderant influence would appear

in Rimbaud’s verse poetry. In any event, it is clear that when we turn our gaze to much of

the poetic production of 1870-71 we are dealing with texts that deeply engage with their

historical and cultural context, the template for which is, of course…Victor Hugo’s

Châtiments.

Yet there is another way of thinking about this Christic presence in Rimbaud’s

poetry – that is, as a secularized figure of the universal community of equals; as a re-

actualization of a socialist trope that was prevalent in revolutionary discourse and

journalism throughout the decades of the 1830s and 40s and up until the Second Empire –

that of the “Christ rouge”.189

Thus, we would be mistaken if we did not take the discourse of Christianity, or

even the figure of Christ for that matter, as discursive configurations around which

important battles were waged over meaning(s), and that were easily and frequently co-

opted by a working-class, radically egalitarian rhetoric of “revolutionary messianism”.190

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, for example, the figure of Christ was appropriated by a

conjunction of working-class political caricature and romantic socialist discourse that

188
On the concept of the author-function, see Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” art. cit., p. 132.
189
See, Robert J. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, op. cit., p.
175. In the late 1860s, in fact at about the moment that the imperial regime played a kind of double game
(in which they ultimately were hoisted on their own petard) around liberalizing freedom of assembly, their
was a marked increase across France of what were known as Red Priests – that is, members of the clergy
who participated in “conférences contradictoires” (i.e., popular public meetings in which a speaker would
be followed by an open debate) and believed that the only way to win back the working classes was to
embrace a rhetoric of equality and social reform prevalent amongst (reform-oriented) socialists. Indeed,
although the Catholic Church is no doubt the furthest thing from a revolutionary institution in the
nineteenth (or any) century, it is easy to understand how Catholicism’s postulate of universal equality in the
body of Christ (cf., especially Paul of Tarsus’s letter to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”)
might not only appeal but be mobilized by socialist and working class organizations to reach a broader
public. Galatians 3:28, http://nlt.scripturetext.com/galatians/3.htm, consulted, 04/20/2010.
190
Alain Dalotel and Jean-Claude Freiermuth, op. cit., pp. 235-43.
 318

transformed it into the Christ Rouge, an image of Christ as a radical, egalitarian

republican that was iconic in political prints around the time of the 1848 revolution and

after.191 Indeed, nineteenth-century communism’s utopian telos of salvation, the end of

History, and the reconciliation of class conflicts by the community of those who have no

community, the proletariat, seems nothing if not resonant of the millennial apocalyptic

tradition in Christianity. Recall for example Marx’s take on the dialectico-historical role

of the working class as the class that will abolish class itself (to which it is apparent that

present-day philosophers of class, subjectivation, and emancipation such as Jacques

Rancière or Alain Badiou are heavily indebted): the working class, i.e., the proletariat,192

as the subject of a universal wrong, constitutes a force “in society which claims no

traditional status, but only a human status (…), which is, in short, a total loss of humanity

(…) which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity…”193

In fact, this fundamental political polyvalence attached to Christic or Messianic

discourse is something that Yves Reboul himself is attentive to in his analysis of “Michel

et Christine”. In his reading of this poem, he remarks that Rimbaud, at the very least in

this poem and later in Une saison en enfer’s “Matin,” is quite consciously borrowing

from the revolutionary political lexicon of his era when he co-opts and demystifies such

191
Robert J. Goldstein, Political Censorship of Caricature in nineteenth-Century France, op. cit., p. 175.
192
For an excellent discussion on the question of what precisely this noun denoted for Marx, and what it
designates today, see Terry Eagleton’s recent Why Marx Was Right (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2011), pp. 167-70. The simplest definition, advanced by Eagleton, is that “proletariat”
corresponds to those who have nothing to lose from the disappearance of capitalist social and economic
relations. Those who are forced to sell their labor to capital, who work under oppressive disciplinary
conditions, and who have little or no control over their working conditions or the stability of their economic
prospects, and who generally work under intense wage and working-day conditions in a state of “assetless
economic insecurity.” Ibid., p. 174.
193
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Marx and Engels: Selected
Works (London: 1969), p. 219, cited in Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, op. cit., p. 166.
 319

cortical, utopian Christological topoi as the Agneau pascal or Noël sur terre.194 Hence,

we might be a little surprised that even the most attentive readings of “Paris” tend to take

away from what we might call the poem’s “ethical imperative,” that is, its call to adopt a

certain ethos, a fairly transparent, if sardonic, denunciation of the structures of late

nineteenth-century political power, and the collusion between the church, the state, and

the bourgeoisie.

In other words, even if this gesture of semantic stabilization remains a perfectly

valid heuristic move, it is nevertheless curious that, given the attention to the ideological

polyvalence of Christic figures in Rimbaud’s works from this period, the meaning of the

imperative soyons chrétiens seems so unproblematically grounded in a grammar of

parody and denunciation.

Perhaps soyons chrétiens simultaneously invokes a much different logic, one of

difference and equality and maybe even revenge, rather than of (mere) melancholic

isolation or bitter disappointment. Note, for instance, that the imperative is not so much

the invocation of a figure, as it is a kind of appeal to constitute a collective, a community.

This perhaps explains more fully the other references to Christianity, such as the

submerged and no doubt parodic allusion to the Communion in the form of pains vieux

and vins spiritueux. Nevertheless, if the referent of this antonomastic allusion is indeed

the catholic communion, it is difficult, if not impossible, not to hear a spectral trace of the

Commune in this deformed, or secularized, mass. The Christs isolated in the fourth line

of verse are remarkable, not only for their humorous graphical and formal juxtaposition

194
In this vein, Reboul cites an extremely pertinent passage by a journalist writing in the journal Le
Conservateur de la République in 1848 (note the shift from a God to the People, a historical force tasked
with redeeming humanity from capitalism): “ Il y a 1848 ans, un Dieu mourait pour racheter le monde du
pêché ! (…) Le jour de Pâques s’accomplira (…). Pâques 1848, c’est la résurrection du Peuple !,” in Y.
Reboul, op. cit., p. 218.
 320

with the preceding robinets, but also to the extent that they are plural rather than singular.

That is, the emphasis is not placed so much on the singular, (in)human subject – Le

Christ – who dies to redeem humanity, as it is on the plurality that is apostrophized as the

(absent) figuration of a universal community. More to the point, without disqualifying

other, philologically rich analyses suggesting that the Christs in question are an ironic

reference to those amongst the bourgeoisie who, à la Hugo or à la Coppée, stood idly by

while thousands of Parisians were massacred, it is not only legitimate but coherent with

respect to the Rimbaldian tactic of subversive deterritorialization of the imaginary of

Christianity to take the referent of Ô Christs as the Commune itself; that is, as an

inscription of the mutilated body of the revolutionary city and the thousands of “martyrs”

who perished in the attempt to rethink the parameters of the political and the collective.

Anon., Le Baiser de Judas, 1871.

Indeed, in at least two caricatures published some time in 1871, an allegorical

vision of the Commune is set up in affiliation with episodes relating to the crucifixion of

Christ. “Le baiser de Judas” offers a biblically inspired allegory of the intense mistrust

that separated Parisians from the forces in Versailles, portraying foreign affairs Minister

Jules Favre’s pseudo-ouvertures to negotiation with the elected mayors of Paris as Judas
 321

buying time in order to deliver the Commune to Versailles, if not indeed to the Prussian

army. Under the title of “La Grande crucifiée!!! Le Martyre immortalisé,” the Commune

is explicitly depicted the as a Christic figure, if not as

a kind of avatar of the Messiah crucified on (sacrificed

for?) the rest of the French nation.195

E. Courtaux, Le Martyre immortalisé, allégorie de la France républicaine 1871.

Perhaps, then, soyons chrétiens is an act of memory, an appeal to re-think the

commun, and to re-imagine the community not along the lines of some mystico-

biopolitical thinking of the Nation as an organic substance rooted in blood and soil but

rather according to an universal model of equality which could include in the texture of

society its excluded sans-part. For, if anything, we know that Rimbaud spent a good deal

of time with his bible à la tranche vert-chou, and was probably not insensitive to

precisely this sort of ethos – revolutionary in its own right, pulverizing as it does what we

might call with Rancière the partage du sensible of the pagan cosmos or ancien régime–

when St. Paul writes that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor freeman, but

solely the community of believers. In the traumatic aftermath of the semaine sanglante, it

195
The other caricature published under the series of “La Grande Crucifiée” depicts the hydra of monarchy
strangling the feminine allegory of the Commune as Thiers watches from the sidelines. The subtitle is,
“République et réaction!!!”. See, as for the caricatures above,
http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/siege/docs/PAR00710.html.
 322

is our claim that soyons chrétiens ought to be read as an appeal to the emancipatory logic

at the heart of the early Christian teleology. It needs to be read as a rejection of the logic

of the police, with its naturalized hierarchies and inequalities in favor of the radical

contingency of being-together in the name of a belief in equality and (reinvented) love –

love which, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek recently observed, “is the

force of [a] universal link [that], in the emancipatory collective, connects people directly,

in their singularity, by-passing their particular hierarchical determinations.”196

To continue in this vein, given the general cultural context of violence and

memory, of violence upon memory itself (i.e., aiming at what Lacan calls the “second

death,” or the effacement of one’s subject position from the symbolic fabric of reality),197

we’d do well to observe just how potentially, adamantly, and perhaps violently defiant

the Christian ethos is with regards to violence. We’re of course all somewhat familiar

with the Christian proverb that specifically engages with the ethics of violence:

“Whoever should slap your right cheek, turn the other to him as well”.198 But isn’t this

just a wishy-washy way of promoting impassivity in the face of class-warfare? Far from

it. Žižek, glossing on Matt Dabbs’ commentary of third-century rabbinical law, points out

that within the cultural and legal context of rabbinic legal regulations of the first centuries

of our era, there’s nothing random about such an act that properly speaking aims at

196
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), p. 117. Of course, something of this
Christic gesture that radically upends traditions of particularized instances of domination through the
advent of a singular figure universal emancipation can be heard in one of Marx’s early, provocative
assessments of the social and historical role of the proletariat, that paradoxical “impossible” class that
“claims no traditional status but only a human status” that will redeem humanity through its own
redemption in the struggle for emancipation and the eventual dissolution of class society. See Karl Marx,
“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in op. cit. p. 166.
197
Lacan elaborates upon this critical notion in his seminal discussion of Kant, Sade, and the figure of
Antigone in, Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-
1960), Jacques Alain-Miller, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 211, 248, 254, 260, 294-5.
198
The Holy Bible, Mathew 5:38-40.
 323

defacing the Other. Being slapped with the (back of the) right hand on the right cheek

was much more degrading and shameful a gesture than being slapped with the palm of

the hand on the left cheek. It was equivalent to drawing a kind of irreducible gap at the

level of the other’s humanity, for that is how slaves or animals were struck. The point of

‘turn the other cheek’ is not so much to relish masochistically in one’s humiliation as it is

a provocation. In essence, to turn the other cheek is to say to one’s aggressor, “go ahead

and do that again, and let’s see if you’re a little more willing to admit that I am your

equal, that the gap between us is not as great as your initial act indicated”; it is a defiant,

and indeed violent, ultimatum to “the other [is] to treat me as equal, an equal who, as

equal, has the right to defend himself” – it is a gesture, in other words, which sets reeling

the very socio-symbolic order which made the first ignominious blow possible.199

Perhaps, then, we would do better to consider the closing soyons chrétiens as much closer

to adopting the tone of revolutionary vengeance in Verlaine’s “Les Vaincus” (“car les

morts sont bien morts, et nous vous l’apprendrons”), than that of a bitter resignation in

the face of the eternal return of the political same. Its duplicitous message might be read:

Paris may have been defeated, but the “Christic Commune” isn’t dead – it too may return

more powerful than before in the guise of a (potential) “Name” of community. In other

words (or, in the words of the Other), “Paris” may be saying to us: “La Commune est

morte, vive la Commune”.200

199
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, op. cit., pp. 125-6.
200
To gloss Marx’s take on the defeat of the Parisian proletariat in June of 1848. Karl Marx, La Lutte des
classes, op. cit., p. 42. Rimbaud would be far from alone in activating and deterritorializing the Christian
discourse of sacrifice and redemption as an allegory of the Paris Commune. Note that, in a posthumously
published poem entitled “Le Pressoir,” (a poem published in 1891 but which no doubt dates from the
1870s), Eugène Pottier (he of l’Internationale fame) unites these topoi in a poem where the red of blood,
wine, and politics appears to flow into a single metaphorical reference to the “passion of the Commune”
and the day of redemption so longed for: “Quand viendra le beau vendémiaire / On verra, des pressoirs
sacrés, / Le vin, l’amour, et la lumière / Couler pour tous les altérés; Du gibet quittant les insignes, Jésus
 324

We must see in “Paris,” and indeed perhaps in the Cercle zutique, a defiantly

melancholic trace, or perhaps an encryption, of the loss of the “community of those

without community” – a loss which, in the aftermath of the semaine sanglante, had been

refused recognition, officially disavowed as an ungrievable non-event. For what means of

expressing grief are available when, coupled with an official sanction on memory, the

loss is presented as a gain for the “organic” community of the Nation? At base, what is

operating in representations of the Commune as a cataclysm for humanity, and of

communards as non-human homines sacri, is what Judith Butler has elsewhere described

as a cultural regulation and distribution of grief that dehumanizes the victims of violence

and places epistemological and esthetic limits on the kinds of life and ideas whose loss

can be acknowledged. I would propose that we think about the texts that we have

examined above as a kind of method of maintaining – or perhaps even a performative

instance of – a community whose loss has been negated. The writing experiments that are

contained in the Album zutique are therefore a kind of theory of language as profoundly

rooted in history and society, in a larger collective with its struggles over and for

narrative and recognition. We must understand at least some of these texts as ethical

engagements, as a form of praxis which brings the unarticulated loss into speakable grief,

“[which] constitute[s] an intolerable eruption within the terms of what is speakable in

public,”201 and dismantles the supplementary symbolic violence that resides in silencing

the voices of the dead, of those who are radically infans. In a very real and poignant

sense, the very existence of the Cercle zutique points first and foremost towards a

déclouant ses bras las, / Au Calvaire planté de vignes / Mettra sa croix pour échalas.” Eugène Pottier,
Oeuvres Complètes, Pierre Brochon, ed. (Paris: Maspéro, 1964), p. 108; cited in Richard D.E. Burton,
Blood in the City, op. cit., p. 145.
201
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Politics of Violence and Mourning (London and New York: Verso,
2004), pp. 33-7.
 325

practice, or at the very least bears the haunted trace of, and persists in re-membering and

repeating, a lost ideal (of) community in the face of impossible and indeed sometimes

dangerous odds. In that respect, it’s really no surprise that a text such as “Paris” should be

at the heart of the Album zutique.

VIII. That Obscure Object of Parody: “Le Sonnet du trou du cul,” or Writing Hand-
in-Hand
L’amour est à réinventer, on le sait.
- Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en enfer

N’existe-t-il pas entre vous et Rimbaut [sic] d’autres relations que celles de l’amitié?
- Interrogation of Paul Verlaine, Bruxelles, June 1873

L’Idole
Sonnet du Trou du Cul

Obscur et froncé comme un œillet violet

Il respire, humblement tapi parmi la mousse
Humide encor d'amour qui suit la fuite douce
Des Fesses blanches jusqu'au cœur de son ourlet.

Des filaments pareils à des larmes de lait

Ont pleuré, sous le vent cruel qui les repousse,
À travers de petits caillots de marne rousse
Pour s'aller perdre où la pente les appelait.

Mon Rêve s'aboucha souvent à sa ventouse ;

Mon âme, du coït matériel jalouse,
En fit son larmier fauve et son nid de sanglots.

C'est l'olive pâmée, et la flûte câline ;

C'est le tube où descend la céleste praline :
Chanaan féminin dans les moiteurs enclos !

Albert Mérat
P.V – A.R.202

202
Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, “L’Idole – Sonnet du trou du cul,” in Œuvres Complètes, op. cit., p.
171.
 326

Let us conclude this chapter with a look at one of the most important texts of the

Album zutique, if not in the history of gay literature, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s

collaborative parody of Albert Mérat’s L’Idole, “Sonnet du trou du cul”.203 Published in

1869, Mérat’s L’Idole contained 20 sonnets, each one a blason, that is, a sonnet dedicated

to a different part of the feminine body. To his contemporaries, Mérat was known as a

poet who:

avait (…) un talent de sonnettiste, confirmé par son recueil L’Idole composé de vingt
sonnets dont dix-huit, entre prologue et épilogue, sont des blasons, dans la tradition de la
Renaissance, des diverses beautés anatomiques du corps féminin.204

Though in his prologue and indeed throughout the work Mérat positions his work

as an act of poetic bravado seeking to “saisir tous les accents et rendre tous les traits/ De

la Femme,” and indeed goes so far in the “Dernier sonnet” as to situate his collection of

blasons within an intertextual relationship to Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du mal,

his work remains firmly entrenched in the sorts of Parnassian esthetics that, following

Seth Whidden, we have evoked elsewhere in this work.205 This is especially the case with

regards to the distanciation of the poet from the present (in the prologue, Mérat compares

his work to that of Da Vinci), in the recourse to the trope of “petrification” of the

feminine so typical of Parnassian, and indeed romantic, representations of the feminine

subject. Take for instance the quatrains from the “Sonnet du nez,” where it is indeed not

impossible to detect a kind of intertextual nod to Théophile Gautier: “(…) Le nez, suite

du front classiquement étroit, / se dessine un peu grand, irréprochable et droit, dans la

203
See Steve Murphy, Le Premier Rimbaud, ou l’apprentissage de la subversion (Lyon: Presses
Universitaires de Lyon, 1991), pp. 249-67; Seth Whidden, “Les Transgressions de Rimbaud dans L’Album
zutique,” Parade Sauvage: Hommage à Steve Murphy (Charleville-Mézières: Imprimerie Anciaux, S.A.,
2008), pp. 404-13; Philippe Rocher, “Le Sonnet du Trou du Cul et Poétique de l’Obscène,” in La Poésie
jubilatoire, op. cit., pp. 173-211.
204
Philippe Rocher, art. cit, p. 182.
205
Albert Mérat, L’Idole (Paris : Alphonse Lemerre, 1869), p. 3; Seth Whidden, op. cit.
 327

convention plastique des camées (…)/ Cléopâtre (…) avait ce nez dont (…) la grâce fit

qu’Antoine oublia ses armées”.206

Yet the textually ambivalent status of the feminine object of desire is perhaps

nowhere more evident than on the metapoetic level itself, in the very choice of poetic

form that Mérat deploys in order to “unabashedly celebrate” the totality of the female

body. Indeed, there is a kind of unrelenting violence residing in this impossibly

paradoxical attempt at totalization of the feminine Other. This attempt to tame the Other’s

body stumbles before it even begins to the extent that this form of totalizing writing

symbolically depends on the decomposition of the feminine body into a fragmented series

of re-composed, fetishized, poetic (partial) objects or synecdoches (eyes, breasts, lips,

legs, etc.) which can be contained and mastered by the masculine gaze (and pen). The

enterprise itself, despite the objective it sets in the prologue (to “tell the whole truth” of

the eroticized body), collapses into a form of poetic infancy, relying increasingly on a

play of silence, self-censorship, and transparently banal metaphors and allusions as the

masculine gaze approaches what we might call the “Thing”. Specifically, the closer Mérat

gets to those erotic and paraphilic “holes” around which heteromasculine desire

circulates, the more saturated and encrypted becomes the language, the more sublimated

these “objects of desire” become, until they disappear altogether in the titles: for the

buttocks, Mérat entitles his sonnet “Avant-dernier sonnet,” and the blason for the vagina

simply becomes “Le dernier sonnet”. Let us lend an ear and a careful eye to this “last

sonnet,” and its representational strategies:

Dernier Sonnet

206
Albert Mérat, ibid., p. 10.
 328

Après les yeux, après la bouche, après l’éclat

Des cheveux, poursuivant la grâce du poème,
Je ne rencontrais pas une beauté suprême
Qu’une autre, sans pouvoir lui nuire, n’égalât.

Mais ce siècle est menteur bien plus que délicat ;

Sa pudeur a poussé les feintes à l’extrême.
Voici qu’il a flétri ce dernier sujet, même
Avant qu’un simple trait de plume marquât.

Donc mon œuvre sera par moi-même meurtrie :

Au lieu du nu superbe, un pli de draperie
Dérobera la fuite adorable des flancs.

Encore il se peut bien qu’un vil regard indique

Ce voile, malgré soi moulant les contours blancs,
Comme une invention de Vénus impudique.207

The question of why Rimbaud and Verlaine choose to parody Mérat, and how

they do so is, if a bit speculative, fairly easy to answer. In a sense the subversion at work

in the “Sonnet du trou du cul” simply consists in beating Mérat at his own game; it

consists in pointing up the hypocritical dimensions at work in his poetic “idolization”

(that is, reification) of the body, his immobilization of desire in the poetic and cultural

normative constraints of the early 1870s, and, ultimately, Mérat’s self-censorship. As

Philippe Rocher underscores, “(l)e Sonnet du trou du cul, par son contenu et par son titre

prend d'abord Mérat au mot à propos de ‘la forme tout entière /Qui n'a point de détails

honteux ou mal venus’”.208 In other words, their parodic radicalization of Mérat’s œuvre

consists quite simply in the affirmation that there is no impudique subject, and that, in a

kind of Hegelian twist, vile subject matter exists merely in the gaze of he who poses upon

the world a “regard vil”.

When Mérat writes, “Encore, il se peut bien qu'un vil regard indique/ Ce voile

malgré soi moulant les contours blancs,/ Comme une invention de Vénus impudique,” he

207
Albert Mérat, L’Idole, op. cit., pp. 38-9.
208
Philippe Rocher, op. cit.
 329

is clearly referring to the last (le dernier objet) unrepresentable “thing” that threatens to

potentially undermine the economy of signifiers of heteromasculinity – that is, the

feminine sex. It appears as though Rimbaud and Verlaine pick up rather quickly on the

strange, perverse logic of representation at work at the end of Mérat’s L’Idole. It is

indeed a kind of logic of the fetish in the Freudian sense of the term, of anxiety

engendered by absence where the gaze was expecting presence, by encountering nothing

where there should be something. This encounter with absence is thus veiled, unless the

veil in the thirteenth line of verse is to be read, along with the pli, as a reference to the

“sex that is not one,” the labia, and the “Vénus” as an encrypted reference to the mons

veneris, the vulva. Mérat’s “Dernier sonnet,” then, is a sonnet that unconsciously, at the

level of its poetic and semiotic representations, reproduces the Oedipal complex, the fear

of castration (whence the “œuvre par moi-meme meurtrie”).

What may have potentially triggered Rimbaud and Verlaine’s parody might have

been the manner in which Mérat justified his anatomico-poetic obfuscation, his

acquiescence to normative regimes of sexuality against which he raises a feeble protest

by way of justifying his lack of courage de la vérité. “Mais ce siècle est menteur,” is his

half-hearted explanation (which has the supplementary gall to enlist Baudelaire’s

hypocrite lecteur) for the absence of a “Sonnet du vagin” or indeed a “Sonnet des fesses”

(for the “Avant-dernier sonnet” is decidedly a blason of the buttocks). To this obscure(d)

object of desire, Rimbaud and Verlaine respond with a parodic re-inscription of Mérat’s

idolized feminine body with a sonnet whose opening seme, Obscur, plays with the

unveiling effect of its ob-scene title (the etymon of “obscure,” obscurus, of course refers

to the act of “covering over,” or veiling, an object).

 330

As to why Albert Mérat should be the object of parody at the hands of Verlaine

and Rimbaud, Steve Murphy provides one further, humorous explanation. For Murphy,

there are, after all, at least two ways of reading the title of this sonnet, and that hinge

around the semantic sense of the preposition and the generality/specificity of the article

compounded in “du”. Indeed, there’s a kind of amphibology at work in the title that

opens up and destabilizes its referent. Either we can read the title as ‘the sonnet whose

subject is the asshole’, or, taking a different approach that places emphasis on the

question of agency or authorship (that is, the genitive), we might read the title as ‘the

sonnet written by the asshole’.209 If we read the title as ‘the sonnet written by the asshole

Albert Mérat’, we must also take Mérat as a metonym of the Parnassian esthetic, as a

kind of poetics which failed miserably to live up to the task of the poet, namely, the task

of courageously reinventing love and life itself. Failing at this task, Murphy suggests,

only leaves one with an outmoded poetic verb that is “cucul la praline,” and which merits

parodic critique.210

Still, Mérat, to whom Rimbaud and Verlaine not only parodically attribute, by

counterfeiting his signature and by appropriating the title of his collection of poetry,

homosexual desire, may be an ‘asshole’ in another, more immediately serious sense.

Mérat was not only regarded as a traitor to poetry in Rimbaud and Verlaine’s eyes. More

fundamentally, he may have been perceived as a traitor to their circle of friends when he

took a job working for the Ministry of the Interior – that is, for the branch of the French

government that included both the army which had crushed the Commune and the police,

209
Steve Murphy, Le Premier Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 261.
210
Ibid.
 331

which was actively and intensively spying on both former or supposed Communards and,

of course, arresting homosexuals.211

When reading this text, then, we must ask ourselves what critical and historical

accounts are available to us for thinking about the singular translation, or transition,

which takes place when Rimbaud and Verlaine deterritorialize Mérat’s heteronormative

poetics of the feminine body in order to create an erotic poetics of homosexual desire.

How do we account for their writing on the male body, and how ought we both

contextualize and theorize the poetic celebration of a love which, in the nineteenth

century, was for many the object of police and cultural repression? In a word, what are

the stakes at play in the act of parody, in the act of collaboration, and in the act of writing

(about) a desire that “dare not speak” its name? At stake in this seminal instance of

homotextuality is in fact a quite stunning ode to homoerotic desire that far outstrips its

apparent target (i.e., Mérat’s self-censored sonnets). What takes place in the “Sonnet du

trou du cul” is a radical revalorization, recoding, or queering, of the anus qua abject site

of the irrepresentable, the incommensurable, the unnamable site of desire of the almost-

other – as the site where, as Kristeva puts it, the subject meets its impossibility.212 It is in

this sense that Whidden is right to insist on the proleptic structure of the text, which

opens and closes (“breathing humbly,” as it were) on the same phoneme graphically

reiterating and repositioning the “subject/object” that the text celebrates in a kind of

circularity which, precisely, fails to close down the poem: O(bscur)/ (encl)O(s). Indeed,

this “O” must be taken as both the “vide” of the object of desire (the objet a) and, to the

degree that it is the “subject” of the sonnet, the void at the heart of the lyric subject which

211
Ibid., p. 256. See also, Claude Jeancolas, Le Dictionnaire Rimbaud, op. cit., s.v. “ Mérat ”.
212
Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 3-13.
 332

meets its very impossibility in the post-Commune period.213 Indeed, the “O,” the hole,

here provides both a metonym of desire (or, of desire qua metonymic, as Lacan would

put it) and a metaphor for the vide of subjectivity as such – of subjectivity as a

multiplicity of possible, dialogic positions, of a “je” emerging in response to the

“Other’s” call. Its insistent suggestion is that identity shares a structural similarity with

desire to the extent that it too is a play of “je et un autre”.

On this note, it suffices to underscore that in this (overly) lyrical sonnet there are

two agents, or active lyrical subjects – namely, the anus itself, which “breathes humbly”

in the quatrains and the “Dream” and the “soul jealous of material coitus” in the tercets.

Interestingly enough, the one truly flagrant use of internal enjambment takes place

precisely in the 10th line of verse, which happens both to place “coït” at the very heart of

the alexandrine and, because of the “rejet” of the complement “matériel,” also manages

to “baiser” the caesura. With Verlaine and Rimbaud, the abject becomes not just an

object (of desire) “elevated to the dignity of the thing,” but indeed a (materialized)

subject in its own right.

Perhaps the veritable genius of the “Sonnet du trou du cul” resides in the very

gesture by which the “abject,” that which doesn’t “respect rules, limits and identities,” is

given representation precisely by overly respecting the formal rules of lyric poetry. That

is to say, this sonnet dismantles the limits of what can be considered a blason precisely

by playing the rules of the sonnet against itself in the act of deterritorializing a forme

noble and giving it an ignoble content (or, at the very least, a content that in normative

terms remains at the level of the repressed “virtual real” of the body). Note, for example,

that we have here a formally strict sonnet that respects the norms of the genre (e.g.,
213
Seth Whidden, “Les Transgression… ,” art. cit., p. 408.
 333

constant rhymes between the quatrains), and even a (no doubt deliberately parodic)

highly traditional, almost ringard poetic license in the suppression of the mute “e” at the

end of “encore” in the third line of verse, the aim of which is to preserve the

dodecasyllabic count of the alexandrine. Contrast, for that matter, the deliberate, slangy

anatomical vulgarity of the title, which clearly takes as its target the sanctimonious

sublimation of Mérat’s “Dernier sonnet,” with the frankly beautiful and rich cultivation

of assonance and alliteration within the body of the text itself that creates a kind of

musical harmony capable of deploying the most basic material of poetry, and indeed of

language, the symbolic itself, in order to create a space where a “love confined to

silence” (that is, to a kind of ontological and epistemological infantia) can be given form,

audibility, visibility, and dicibility. Indeed, the first alexandrine seems to overflow with

that romantic phoneme/phatic par excellence, Ô: “Obscur et froncé comme un oeillet

violet [O O O O]. In sum, the quatrains quite simply describe, in an elaborately poetically

staged manner, a post-coital – the references to larmes are to be read as both a well-

known metaphor in libertine literature the referent of which is semen and perhaps as a

kind of humorous citation of the omne animal trista post-coitum – trickle of ejaculate

flowing from the anus, which is of course here the “Chanaan féminin,” the paradoxically

gendered promised land of milk and honey.214

If we keep in mind that we have before us an almost too perfect sonnet that takes

aim not only at Mérat and French society’s hypocritical pudeur or homophobia, but also

214
I wonder if, on some playful level of calembours, there is not all the same a critical link to the esthetico-
political, and one might add materialist, critique of poetic idols that we explored in Nina. For, if we play
somewhat with the (first) title given to this poem, we phonetically obtain: Les reparties de Nina Æ le r  p
ar: ti Æ l r  par:ti Æ l’air (e) parti de Nina. In sum, we have a poetic idol that, to the degree that it
“brassait du vent” has the wind taken out of it (or breaks wind, as it were), has lost its breath, soul, or life
(pneuma) – is graphically (in the sense of explicit, obscene, etc.) and graphematically (in the sense of the
play of writing and repetition with difference) dégonflé to the degree that it was an idol gonflé or gonflant.
 334

at Parnassian style as such, an intriguing reading of the “Sonnet du trou du cul” emerges.

What we are dealing with is not simply a motley crew of intoxicated, renegade

Parnassians stuck in esthetic low-gear, but a very complicated kind of strategic writing

that admixes a “courage of the truth,” an esthetics of parody and displacement of speech

with a deliberately sardonic political critique of French poetry. The “Sonnet du trou du

cul” is more than a simple parody of an overly prudish Parnassian poet (though it is that

too, and this parody in particular is no doubt also one of the reasons for which Mérat took

a disliking to the two poets), it represents a form of poetic praxis of desire, written in

tandem with Verlaine, that takes aim at the normative esthetico-erotic tradition of the

sonnet which, as Gretchen Schultz reminds us, is a tradition of the lyric that “invariably

represented a male speaking subject in contemplation of a female object”.215

Furthermore, in the displacement of esthetic, ideological, and cultural norms from silence

into a form of articulation that makes the surface of the text a locus for experiencing the

oral and aural pleasure of the male body, this collaborative text effects a three-fold

departure from restricted and proscribed gender roles, poetic practices, and

intersubjective relations. In this movement from infantia into a sort of speech act that

refuses to ratify the abject status of the gay body,216 “Le Sonnet du trou du cul” “forg[es]

new subject positions in the face of lyric conventions that[compelled to silence]

homosexuality,” and indeed “the possibility of homoerotic verse”.217

215
Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric, op. cit., p. 223.
216
Cf., infra. See also, for a pertinent reading of the cultural abjection of homosexual bodies (written at the
height of the AIDS epidemic and in the face of a massive silent, indifferent, and indeed masochistic cultural
and political response to this public health crisis) Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43
(Winter: 1987), pp.197-222.
217
Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric, op. cit., pp. 221-3.
 335

Philippe Rocher is indeed right to point out the tension deliberately created

between form and content in this sonnet, (“l'incongruité fondatrice d’un blason pour un

trou du cul, et [le] comique par lequel, en accord avec les canons du genre, un sonnet en

alexandrins, ‘quintessence’ de la forme noble s'il en est”). However, we might slightly

modulate his argument when he affirms that all that occurs in the sonnet is the act of

elevating “la trivialité d’un anus à la dignité des ‘beautés’ féminines traditionnellement

exaltées.”218 For, as we have argued and as we shall see, there really is nothing trivial to

such a (profoundly subversive) gesture in the repressive context of post-Commune

France.

To that end, we must recall something of the socio-cultural and epistemological

status of homosexuality in late nineteenth-century Europe. Post-Foucaultian textualists

and cultural historians know much better than to take at face value what is known as the

“repressive hypothesis,” that is, the presupposition that sexuality was somehow the object

of a prudish veil of silence prior to the sexual liberation movements of the twentieth

century. On the contrary, Foucault has demonstrated, with a methodical attention to

discourse and practices of sexuality that comes very close to irrefutable, that human

sexuality has been a constant object of solicitation and “incitement to discourse” for

disciplinary and biopolitical regimes of knowledge/power.219 Indeed, when one surveys

the vast panoply of police and medical literature on homosexuality, from Canler to

Tardieu, one is inevitably drawn to reaffirm Foucault’s critique of the “repressive

hypothesis”. If anything, the nineteenth century is an era where the norm concerning

sexuality is that of prolixity, of a massive production of texts producing a corpus of

218
Philippe Rocher, op. cit.
219
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 1-36.
 336

knowledge and a truth about certain subjects deemed “abnormal”. In what sense, then,

may we speak, as have some – including the best – readers of this sonnet as a symbolic

practice of counter-discourse that gives a voice to what we have theorized in this work as

the infans (and infantilized) subject? In response to this potential critical aporia, we may

begin by agreeing with Steve Murphy that the importance of counter or sub-cultural texts

such as the “Sonnet” is that they allow for a speaking subject to emerge in a context that

displaces or indeed slips out of the field of the “normal” (i.e., the heteronormative)

altogether, allowing for a form of symbolic agency to be asserted: allowing, for instance,

“[les] homosexuels (…) de se nommer ou de nommer leurs désirs.”220

And perhaps this is not so negligible an accomplishment after all. We might even

think about the physical examination of Verlaine’s anus after his arrest in Brussels (which

itself might have been triggered by the discovery of a homoerotic “inverted” sonnet

amongst his affairs entitled, “Nuits d’Hercule”),221 as a kind of unfortunate inter-text, or

post-script, to the “Sonnet du trou du cul”. Reading it, one can easily gauge the reach of

Ambroise Tardieu’s influence in the propagation of a veritable “scientia sexualis”

amongst European psychiatrists and medico-legalists222 that was deployed at the time to

classify so-called deviant forms of sexual activity and desire in order to keep under

surveillance, punish, and construct a normative truth which increasingly saturated the

220
Steve Murphy, Le Premier Rimbaud, op. cit., p. 266.
221
Why this text might have immediately made the Belgian police suspect Verlaine and Rimbaud of being
lovers is not, in fact, all that mysterious: the final phoneme in Hercule is obviously a perfect homonym for
“cul”. Furthermore, the episode recounting how Hercules dressed in drag to escape queen Omphale made
the mythic figure into a positive symbol of homosexual masculinity appropriated by gay counter-culture in
the nineteenth century. Finally, the form of the sonnet, with the tercets on top, or inverted, may have been
seen as a kind of code for “les invertis,” which was one of the many “scientific” terms (along, for example,
with les antiphysiques) used to classify homosexuals in nineteenth-century medico-psychiatric and
disciplinary discourse prior to Krafft-Ebing’s coining of the epithet “homosexual” in the 1880s.
222
William Peniston points out, however, that Tardieu’s theories and studies were met with no small
amount of resistance in Germany. See, William Peniston, op. cit.,p. 58.
 337

lives of individual gays and lesbians in the nineteenth century. The examination of

Verlaine’s anus reads as follows:

Nous soussignés V. Vleminckx et Ch. Semal, docteurs en médecine, etc. à Bruxelles,

avons été requis par M. t’Serstevens, juge d’instruction, de procéder à l’examen corporel
de Paul Verlaine (…) aux fins de constater s’il porte des traces d’habitudes pédérastiques.
(…) Nous avons constaté ce qui suit : 1 – le pénis est court et peu volumineux – le gland
est surtout petit et va s’amincissant (…) 2 – L’anus se laisse dilater assez fortement, par
un écartement modéré des fesses (…) Ce mouvement met en évidence un infundibulum
évasé, espèce de cône tronqué dont le sommet serait en profondeur. Les replis du
sphincter ne sont pas lésés ni ne portent de traces de lésions anciennes. (…) De cet
examen il résulte que P. Verlaine porte sur sa personne des traces d’habitudes de
pédérastie active et passive.223

A simple glance at Tardieu’s major work on homosexuality, Étude médico-légale

sur les attentats aux mœurs, belies the epistemological substructure of Drs. Vleminckx

and Semal’s physical inspection of Verlaine’s rectum. Tardieu, who in a curious manner

posits homosexuals as first and foremost a semiotico-hermeneutic problem (i.e., he

dedicates a long passage to explaining how to “read” the exterior signs of a homosexual

identity, making of intonation, dress, coiffure, the shape of one’s lips and the sway in

one’s hips, etc. so many textual activities),224 nevertheless posits the following signs as

constituting irrefutable proof of homosexual identity and activity: excessive development

of the buttocks, infundibuliform deformation of the anus, relaxing of the sphincter, and

after special attention to the pliability of the folds of the anus the good doctor’s gaze

comes to the penis itself, which is, depending on the volume and size of the organ, either

“long et (…) très mince, grêle, évidé par le bout,” or “le gland (…) s’allonge (…) de

manière à donner l’idée du museau de certains animaux,” when the member doesn’t

223
“Compte rendu de ‘l’examen corporel’ de Verlaine,” in Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres Complètes, op. cit.,
pp. 431-2. See also Françoise Lalande’s “L’Examen corporel d’un homme de lettres,” Parade sauvage 2
(1984).
224
Ambroise Auguste Tardieu, Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs, 4ème édition (Paris: J. B.
Baillière et Fils, 1862), pp. 166-9.
 338

simply veer off to the right, to the left, or indeed begin to resemble some sort of

improbable phallic cork-screw.225

In her study of homosexuality in late nineteenth-century France, La Loi du

genre,226 Laure Murat foregrounds a convergence between “writing” and “disciplinary

power,” that is, between knowledge and technologies of power, that Michel Foucault first

adumbrated in Surveiller et punir.227 Namely that, on the subject of sexuality (read

“deviant”), there is an archeological correlation between what might appear to be two

discontinuous realms: there is a tie between literature (Balzac, for example) and

disciplinary power (e.g., police reports from the archives of the Prefecture of Police of

Paris, psychiatry, anthropology, etc.). This convergence is as much rhetorical as it is

epistemological. The modern novel, preoccupied as it is with the lives, secrets, and

desires of unremarkable individuals such as a Mme Bovary or a Germinie Lacerteux, can

be “read” as a technology of power that is crucial for providing a kind of imaginary

coherence to the norm, and is no doubt at the heart of a power/knowledge relationship

(that of disciplinary power) crucial to the bourgeoisie’s consolidation of economic and

political power in the nineteenth century. The etymology of the novel may by some

accounts be understood as a discursive drift, emerging out of a secondary or culturally

“incompetent” corpus of texts that Foucault understands as appareils de sécurité. Such

texts would include police fiction, memoirs, and the faits divers section of the newspaper.

From a Foucaultian perspective, the nineteenth-century novel produces, em-plots and

figures imaginary threats to the interior organization and distribution of bourgeois bodies

and roles so as to better police what remains both outside and within the gray frontiers of

225
Ibid., pp. 172-86.
226
Laure Murat, La Loi du genre, op. cit.
227
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 223-7.
 339

class, gender and racial norms – all of which, ultimately, must be seen as categories that

are not only interchangeable, but which are in fact coterminous, metaphorically

interdependent and contingent, crucial for representing the bewilderingly diverse

spectrum of alterity in the nineteenth century.228 We have therefore in the novel, for

example, a mode of discourse that collaborates with discipline, that scrambles discrete

identitary positions together, creating categories of “Difference” that are to varying

degrees always unstable, that are reticulated and deployed along axes of class, race,

gendered subjectivities.

One of Murat’s major – if not essential – insights in gender and sexual difference

in nineteenth-century France has to do with the ways by which the police created

taxonomical orders229 for comprehending (i.e., for reading the signs of the breakdown of

heteronormative models of masculinity and femininity) and apprehending abnormality.

First and foremost, homosexuality was conceived of as a kind of oxymoron in the eyes of

the law: paradoxically, the decriminalization of specific non-genital erotic activity such

as sodomy in 1791, created a kind of impossibility for the police (what was in fact being

designated by sodomy were simply sexual encounters between two people of the same

gender). How were they to negotiate the problem of penalizing a form of sexuality that

was no longer illegal, but which nevertheless was the object of heteronormative anxiety?

The answer to this dilemma came in the form of statutes that would continue to be

employed to harass members of the gay community in France until well into the 1970s:

228
See also, Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in
Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
229
On this note, see Louis Canler’s Mémoires, in which the former head of the Public Safety Division of
the Prefecture affirms the existence of four “types,” or taxonomies, of homosexuality in Paris, all of which
(like Tardieu shall do later in the century), he intimately associates with certain criminal milieux and
activities such as fraud, blackmail, and theft: la persilleuse, la honteuse, la travailleuse, and la rivette.
Louis Canler, Les Mémoires de Canler (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), p. 318.
 340

specifically, the police continued to arrest homosexuals for the crimes of outrage à la

pudeur and débauche de mineur. In other words, the disappearance of a distinct

illegalism, a specific act breaking the law, was replaced by a figure, an (anti)-ethos, a

disruption in the order of bourgeois morality, but also a figure that authorized the

discursive contours of heteronormative regimes of sexuality to emerge, le pédéraste. As

Murat puts it, homosexuality was both “légal et poursuivi, toléré et condamné”.230 The

effect of this oxymoronic legal status was that gay individuals were the object of both an

intense police repression (between 1860 and 1870, 6342 individuals were arrested for

“cruising” in public areas of Paris), and, increasingly, an intense medical gaze.

Second, and perhaps more disturbing for the police, homosexual desire was a

form of personal and/or collective disorder that menaced the natural political order of

class hierarchies.231 The tapette, the tante from the working-classes poses a threat to the

extent that it represents a constant, potential threat of economico-moral perversion of the

upper-classes. Homosexual desire, then, constitutes a symbolic danger on two very

important fronts: it is first a menace to the stability of gender (in the sense of designating

a certain imaginary ontology of man as an object/subject of knowledge), and, second, it is

a threat to the intelligibility of class distinctions. In the 1870s, then, the massive policing

of subjects who were, after all, not breaking any specific law against homosexuality must

be linked on some deeply proximate, genealogical plane to the anxiety of democracy in

the nineteenth century. Indeed Murat’s hermeneutic may be summed up as follows:

gender disorder and anxiety surrounding the political, social, and ontological status

230
Laure Murat, op. cit., p. 30.
231
This is particularly evident in the case of Canler, but the twin questions of class and desire are just as
problematic for François Carlier writing at the end of the century. See his, La Prostitution antiphysique
(Paris: Le Sycamore, 1981), first printed as Étude de pathologie sociale: les deux prostitutions, 1860-1870
(Paris: E. Dentu, 1887).
 341

delegated by gender identity is allegorical for political disruptions and dislocations in

nineteenth-century France. In the case of Verlaine and Rimbaud, these two forms of

deviance, that is, communard politics and homosexual love, converged to make the pair

the object of constant public opprobrium by the likes of Albert Mérat, police surveillance:

a police spy report from London in 1873 indeed alludes to, and in some sense seems to

accept as natural, the fact that the two were not only frequenting political clubs with

exiled communards, but also that they shared a “liaison d’une étrange nature”. A year

later, during Verlaine’s trial in Brussels, the prefect of police of Paris would write a

report to the Belgian judge that similarly conjoins radical politics to sexual difference

within the same field of dangerous alterity:

Pendant la période révolutionnaire, [Verlaine] aurait continué ses fonctions à l’hôtel de

ville (…). [Il] ne tarda pas, toutefois, à s’attirer par ses goûts dépravés le mépris des
personnes qui, tout d’abord, s’étaient intéressé à lui.232

In order to perceive something like the audacity and courage of the “Sonnet”

written by Rimbaud and Verlaine, we need to keep in mind that even to the “enlightened”

gaze of Dr. Tardieu and his epigones, homosexuality was not simply an unnatural

upending of the order of sexual things (as indeed the term antiphysique, or anti-nature,

conveys). For the medical gaze, exactly as for the police of the nineteenth century, it was

a kind of epistemologically and discursively situated amor criminalis. Tardieu, for

instance, opens his discussion of homosexuality thusly in his “De la pédérastie”:

‘Que ne puis-je, s’écriait Fodéré, éviter de salir ma plume de l’infâme turpitude des
pédérastes !’ Comme lui, j’ai longtemps hésité à faire entrer dans cette étude le tableau
repoussant de la pédérastie (…) Je me suis donc décidé non seulement à ne pas passer
sous silence ce triste sujet (…). [C]es habitudes honteuses sont devenues un moyen et
comme un procédé particulier de vol, pour lequel se forme des associations coupables
(…). Enfin, dans des circonstances plus graves, la pédérastie a servi de prétexte, et en

232
“Le Préfet de Police de Paris au Juge d’Instruction,” in Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres Complètes, op. cit., pp.
418, 441.
 342

quelque sorte, d’amorce à l’assassinat (…) [A] Paris la pédérastie est l’école à laquelle
se forment les plus habiles et les plus audacieux criminels.233

Theft, murder, silence, shame, repulsion, and indeed a kind of melancholy – in

other words, we find in Tardieu the principal tropes for literary and metaphysical

representations of homosexuality, from Balzac to Sartre. Such is the imaginary material

with which the homosexual enters into medical taxonomy as an object of knowledge

power. And such are the highly normative and stigmatizing subject positions available to

gays and lesbians in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Indeed, when the “vice” isn’t too

shameful to be spoken of (“l’ombre qui enveloppe ces faits, la honte et le dégoût qu’ils

inspirent”),234 homosexuality is quite simply epistemologically placed on the same

footing as prostitution.235 As with his disciplinary colleagues in the ranks of the police,

Canler and Carlier, for Tardieu too what seems most unconscionable of all in love

amongst men is precisely its capacity to furnish new modes and models for thinking

relationships that by-pass hierarchical particularities such as class, age, and politics. Like

the Baron Charlus chained to the rock of the flesh, relations of power that are otherwise

naturalized as essential conditions of human and social existence are revealed as

contingent, performative, immanently reversible, and indeed are made the object of play

and pleasure:

Mais il est des cas dans lesquels il est difficile de ne pas admettre une véritable
perversion maladive des facultés morales (…). Un de ces hommes descendus d’une
position élevée au dernier degré de la dépravation, attirait chez lui de sordides enfants des
rues devant lesquels il s’agenouillait, dont il baisait les pieds avec une soumission
passionnée avant de leur demander de plus infâmes jouissances. Un autre trouvait une
volupté singulière à se faire donner par derrière de violents coups de pied par un être de
la plus vile espèce. (…) [H]onteuse folie !236

233
Ambroise Tardieu, op. cit., pp. 146-9. My italics.
234
Ibid., p. 148.
235
Ibid., p. 152.
236
Ibid., pp. 162-3.
 343

Although the rhetoric and topoi that accompany Tardieu’s descriptions of

homosexuality throughout his study is one of abjection (the semes “boue,” “honte,”

“repugnant,” “repoussant,” “monstrueux” are too frequent to really need enumeration), it

is rather to the question of “silence” that we should be attentive.237 For “silence,”

“namelessness,” and “shadows” point to a kind of fault-line within the doctor’s discourse,

where his very object and enterprise seem to escape him. This “silence,” or let us call it

that kernel of night that resides at the heart of disciplinary power/knowledge as its

constitutive condition, forms both a kind of leitmotiv and a singularly unstable element

that not only collapses the “pact with the reader” (i.e., “je me suis décidé à ne pas passer

sous silence ce triste sujet”) that Tardieu sets out in his introduction, but places his entire

epistemic enterprise into suspense, leaving him on the mimetic footing of…literature: “je

ne prétends pas faire comprendre ce qui est incomprehensible et pénétrer les causes de la

pédérastie (…); la plume se refuse de tracer [s]es orgies”.238 This “silence” recurs at least

eight times within the first ten pages, in the form of practices that are too dangerous to

explicate for readers who are not “le medecin-légiste (…) le moraliste et le magistrate”. It

finally leads Tardieu to interrupt himself at the very moment that he begins to point to the

vertiginous performativity and rigorous unreliability of gender. In the midst of a

description of homosexuality and transvestitism amongst the poor classes in Paris,

Tardieu reaches a discursive, esthetic, and political limit: “Je m’arrête sans avoir épuisé

237
A further study to which we ought to devote ourselves would be to the particularly fascinating
geography of sexual alterity that Tardieu maps out in this introduction and which clearly suggests a
genealogical relationship between a medical discourse seeking to cartographically apprehend the “dark
continent” of human sexuality and the enterprise of colonialism that was simultaneously mapping out and
exploiting colonies in Africa. For Tardieu posits homosexuality as above all a “southern problem,” Greek
and Italian, but especially North African: as a libidinal practice that “invades” the Metropole at the same
time that France was quite literally invading the Maghreb. See Ibid., p. 153. This same rhetoric of silences
bavards, which merits further analysis, typifies Carlier’s studies of homosexuality from the perspective of
the police of the Third Republic.
238
Ibid., pp. 161-2.
 344

les traits de ces moeurs sans nom dont je pourrais encore accumuler ici les plus horribles

témoignages”.239 He could go on, but mustn’t – he leaves it to the judges and medico-

legalists to “penetrate the mysteries” of pederasty. He does allow himself, however, one

last, long description of the nature of homosexual love, but he does so in Latin, thereby

guaranteeing that only educated, and most likely male, readers will be able to “penetrate”

this mystery that he quite literally silences under the soft, white noise of a long-dead

tongue and occults with the rhetorical device of periphrasis: “Mais je reculerais devant

ces détails immondes si l’on ne me permettait pas de les cacher sous une courte

périphrase latine…”240

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, when we examine the rhetorical strategies upon

which Tardieu relies the most in order to both describe and silence homosexuality

(preterition and periphrasis), and which so patently belie his opening promise to let no

potential object or phenomenon – no matter how “repulsive,” “shameful,” or “vile” it

may be for the man of science – slip away from the light of the scientific gaze, they

cannot but remind us of Mérat. For are these not the very same figures upon which Albert

Mérat falls back when he finally arrives at the “unnamable thing” of feminine sexuality?

Does not Mérat make a similar epistemological commitment to his reader in the opening

sonnet of his Idole, and proceed to undermine this performative promise at the very

moment of its disclosure? It is therefore within the broader context of the constitution of

hetero-normative masculinity and its vicissitudes that we must situate Rimbaud and

Verlaine’s “Sonnet du trou du cul”. Within this larger epistemological and cultural field,

239
Ibid., p. 157. Let us recall that the innomable is both the abject and the almost/failed relation in the
realms of the symbolic and the imaginary. However, if we think about the etymology of proletari as
designating mere life that reproduces itself as merely life, that is, without a name, the innommable might
theoretically point to a problem (of desire) in class relations.
240
Ibid., p. 158. This periphrase is anything but short.
 345

we gain something like an appreciation for the courage that subtended their collective

work – the courage to not shrink away from any form of love, from any object of desire.

The courage not just to give a name to the unnamable, but rather to point out that it has a

name, and that one speaks it every day in everyday language. Indeed, the name that they

give to their sonnet not only parodies Mérat’s wishy-washy romanticism, thereby

revealing the “truth” of its ideological mystifications and obfuscations, it also performs a

rather audacious intermingling of high and low, asserting a principle of transgressive

heteroglossia that defies, and indeed upends, class, gender and linguistic frontiers, that

gives cultural and esthetic form to relationships that were, and in many ways continue to

be categorized within the binary confines of the subculture: Sonnet…du trou du cul.

Conclusion

The “Sonnet du trou du cul,” finally, leaves us as a kind of perfectly condensed

metonym of the ethos and praxis of the Album zutique itself. It both illustrates the

contingent project of the Cercle zutique and asks a question of us: what does the writerly-

collective do differently, in the name of difference, with the aim of making a voice heard

where previously one has heard or perceived mere (infantile) noise, or indeed the silence

of infantia?

Through its emphasis on collaboration, innovation, parody, the sharing of voices

and, to paraphrase Breton, the “collectivization of ideas” in the immediate aftermath of

the Commune, the texts of the Album zutique attempt to strike a blow to the ideological

heart of the myth of the monolithic author (e.g., Gautier’s solitary genius from the

preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, or Vigny’s poet in his ivory tower, etc.). It

 346

undermines the figure or the function of the individual author grounding and stabilizing

the meaning(s) of a text in favor of the writing-process itself.241

As the paratextual indications left in the margins of the “Sonnet du trou du cul”

by Verlaine suggest, the collective text puts into relief the collaborative activity of

inventing and producing (possible) meanings, reinventing what sorts of utterances are

possible in the space of the lyric: “Verlaine invenit, Rimbaud fecit”.242 There they are, on

the margins of French and literary society and in the margins of their own texts, Verlaine

on top (writing the quatrains) and Rimbaud on the bottom (in the tercets, that is, at the

semantically crucial volta of the sonnet), inventing a homotexual poetics, affirming the

beauty and indeed equality of love between men with any and every other form of social,

libidinal, and political relationship. They (re)invent and make love, as it were. This

simple detail ought to remind us that the project of “reinventing love,” which we so

frequently tend to associate with Rimbaud alone, was in fact a collective project, a labor

of love that he shared with Paul Verlaine, if only too briefly. If the “Sonnet du trou du

cul” manages to succeed in getting us to re-think how writing might take place, how

meaning and desire might not be confined to the social, political, and ontological

alienation of the solitary individual, but might also be the creation of a collective seeking

new forms and voices for itself, it does so ultimately, and quite simply, through writing

itself – writing in the voice of the other, and with one’s hand (or signature, or style) in the

other’s.

241
Seth Whidden, “Introduction,” Models of Collaboration, op. cit., p. 3.
242
Seth Whidden, “Les Trangressions…,” art. cit., p. 407. This paratextual positioning of the authors was
added by Verlaine to the manuscript of the text that would appear in the latter’s collection of homoerotic
verse, Hombres. See, Paul Verlaine, Hombres, Steve Murphy, ed. (Béziers: H&O éditions, 2005), p. 104, n.
98. My thanks to Seth Whidden for pointing me towards this source.
 347

Writing the Revolution of the Voiceless: Jules Vallès’s Enfant-Insurgé

Introduction – Failing Again, Failing Better

Few authors lived through the nineteenth century the way Jules Vallès (1832-

1885) did –in some form of revolt on the written page, or on the anacoluthon of the

barricade in “real” life. Like any other French person alive roughly from the beginnings

of the July Monarchy up to the beginnings of the 3rd Republic, Vallès of course witnessed

a period rich in historical, political, and epistemological upheavals. Still, his life and,

subsequently, his writings were otherwise marked by the seal of two popular revolutions:

that of 1848, and the 1871 Paris Commune in which Vallès took part as both an elected

member and as a historical, politically engaged witness writing first-hand, synchronous

accounts of the revolution taking place in Paris in the pages of his short-lived journal Le

Cri du peuple and later, from beyond the symbolic (and then literal) grave in the

posthumously published, L’Insurgé. If in this chapter our attention will be mostly on the

first book in Vallès’s trilogy, L’Enfant, we will also weave in and out of the other two

books, Le Bachelier and L’Insurgé, in order to argue that a dialectical movement from

victim to agent, a constant destabilization of identity, and an ironic interrogation of

authority, or arkhès, informs the entire Trilogie Vingtras.

As a young man in Nantes (he was 16 at the time), the February 1848 revolution

was like a thunder-bolt in what, by all accounts, was a thoroughly monotonous provincial

sky. At the moment that the revolution spread west, Vallès became deeply involved in a
 348

group of lycéens révolutionnaires1 which organized a political club (the Club de jeunesse

révolutionnaire de Bretagne et de Vendée) at one meeting of which a motion was voted

that was described in the following, red-tinted terms taking a direct shot at what

(following Foucault’s Surveiller et punir) appear to be some very large disciplinary

targets: “[cela] commençait par l’abolition radicale du baccalauréat, de tout examen, de

tout diplome, au nom du principe de l’égalité. Il contenait toute sorte de choses (….)

contre la discipline scolaire […et] proclamait le principe de liberté absolue de l’enfance.”

This properly utopian motion carried, Vallès apparently delivered it in person to a

confused secretary at the sous-prefecture with gruff instructions to have it sent on to

“[s]on maître.”2 Years later, in Paris, Vallès would not only be a crucial voice for radical

democracy, publically advocating an absolute freedom of expression when the Commune

voted to censure Versaillais newspapers, he would eventually even take part in the

Commune as an elected representative for the XVe arrondissement. What’s more, on

March 31, 1871, Vallès would be named Minister of Public Education, an episode that

isn’t missed by Edmond de Goncourt when he recounts the events of the Commune in his

journal.3 With an ironic dismay that is as revealingly literary as it is political, and which

1
Vallès was involved in local revolutionary politics to such a degree that his father, Louis Vallez
eventually has him sent off to Paris and in 1851, in a fascinating case of early morbus democraticus that
deserves much further study, was interned in the psychiatric asylum of the Saint-Jacques Hospital in
Nantes. This detail is, curiously enough, altogether omitted or displaced onto a secondary character in
Vallès’s L’Enfant. Vallès’s sole surviving sister, Louise, who by her brother’s account appeared to have
inherited a kind of genetic disposition towards authority, would eventually die in an insane asylum. Her
case too deserves further attention. In any event, as Michelle Perrot suggestively writes, the legal category
of “correction paternelle,” a sort of genetic mutant of the infamous eighteenth-century lettres de cachet,
were still very much in existence and could be deployed almost without appeal by “unruly” minors (i.e.,
children, adolescents, but also married women). See Michelle Perrot, Les Ombres de l’histoire: crime et
châtiment au XIXe siècle (Paris : Flammarion, 2001), pp. 337-349.
2
Gaston Gilles, Jules Vallès (1832-1885) : sa révolte, sa maîtrise, son prestige (Genève: Slatkine, 1981),
p. 29. Roger Bellet’s biography, Jules Vallès (Paris: Fayard, 1995), is an indispensable guide to Vallès’s
life and work. For the period concerning the 1848 revolution and the 1851 coup d’état, see pp. 84-104. See
also, Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 200-228.
3
Edmond’s brother, Jules, had died in July of the previous year.
 349

proves that Vallès was already a controversial public intellectual prior to the Commune,

de Goncourt makes the following entry in his journal on Friday, March 31st, 1871:

Risum teneatis – Jules Vallès est ministre de l’éducation publique. Le bohème des
brasseries occupe le fauteuil de Villemain (…). Un gouvernement, dont un membre a osé
écrire que Homer était à mettre au rancart (…) apparaît au bourgeois plus épouvant, plus
subversif, plus anti-social, que si ce gouvernement décrétait le même jour, l’abolition de
l’hérédité et le remplacement du mariage par l’union libre.4

The Paris Commune represents the apex of Vallès’s militant artistic and

journalistic engagement with nineteenth-century revolutionary politics. It would be for

him that “minute attendue depuis la première cruauté du père (…), la revanche du

collège, de la misère, et de décembre.”5 This brief passage from L’Insurgé manages to

metonymically position the final installment of the trilogy in relation to its preceding

books. It constructs a strategy of insistence on the organic totality of the Trilogie Vingtras

that Charles Stivale has also noted in his reading of the functions of the “pre-texts,” or the

stylistically sylleptic dedicaces to various “victims” of nineteenth-century French society

at the beginning of each of the trilogy’s books.6

And yet, taken at least in a merely historicist perspective, the Commune was a

massive and devastating failure that delivered a crushing blow to working-class identity

formations and politics for at least a generation. Let us, then, begin by drawing a

conceptually indispensable distinction between what we might call two divergent

readings of an “event,” and which will allow us to enrich our understanding of Vallès’s

trilogy: on the one hand, there is a punctual reading of an event with a clearly discernible

economic, historical, cultural, and epistemological genealogy. Thus, serious-minded

4
Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 1870-1871 (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1890), pp.
241-2.
5
Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), p. 224.
6
Charles Stivale, Oeuvre de sentiment, oeuvre de combat: La Trilogie de Jules Vallès (Lyon: Presses
Universitaires de Lyon, 1988), pp. 32-5.
 350

historians could rightfully argue that, had Parmentier only not been so ridiculed amongst

the aristocracy, that is, had he been able to convince large landed property owners to

begin cultivating potatoes, there would have been a back-up crop to absorb some of the

inflationary shock, to say nothing of the risk of famine, in the price of wheat in 1788-9.

Mutatis mutandis, the fate of the monarchy hung on a spud. In this perspective “events”

can all too easily be analytically “explained away,” which is to say denied the status of an

“Event” in the more radically subversive, and I would argue Vallésian and Rimbaldian,

sense of a certain coming-to (as the etymology, ex-venire, of the term suggests) of an

Idea of justice, of equality, of democracy out of “the inherent inconsistency/excess” of an

official order of things that the “Event” renders “visible/legible”.7 This second level of

evenementiality is what we attend to in the Vallésian inscription of the Commune as not

only the “failure” that expulsed him into a kind of entre-les-deux-morts8 from which he

would not only write his masterful critique of class relations and domination in France

from the July monarchy to the massacre of the Commune, but remain obstinately faithful

to what could, in the historicist sense outlined above, be rightfully perceived as an utterly

“lost cause”. Nevertheless, in its re-inscription in the space of the novel, the Commune

“survives its defeat in socio-historical reality (…), continues to lead an underground

7
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), p.
130. On the occasion of the centenary of the Paris Commune, Georges Haupt mentions just such a
divergence within the various histories written on/about the Commune that separate the “event” from the
“Symbol/Example” (or Event, in the sense outlined above). See Georges Haupt, “La Commune comme
symbole et comme exemple,” Le Mouvement Social 79 (Apr.-May, 1972), pp. 205-226.
8
Cf., Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 270-83. It goes without saying that, in
a strictly legal sense, prior to the 1880 amnesty of former Communards, writing anything remotely critical
of the “holy [bourgeois] family” might well pass for criminal, but writing about the Commune was subject
to intense censorship well into the late 1870s (cf., supra our chapter on the Album zutique).
 351

spectral life of the ghosts of failed utopias which haunt future generations, patiently

awaiting their resurrection.”9

While Vallès barely managed to escape being murdered by the forces de l’ordre,

who summarily executed one poor soul on the basis of his beard’s resemblance to that of

Vallès,10 approximately 20-25,000 Parisians would not be quite so lucky.11 Thus, in 1871,

upon the bloody background of the semaine sanglante and the “failure” of the Commune,

a nine year long exile which coincided with the debut of his literary career stricto sensu

began for Vallès. Though this exile would be shared in London with (a small community

of) French communards12 seeking refuge in the Soho neighborhood of London, Vallès’s

literary debuts were difficult to say the least. This difficulty was due at once to his death-

sentence and to rigorous censorship in France:

la publication dans les journaux français lui est interdit […et] ces dix-sept [premiers]
mois d’exil sont les plus noirs des années de l’exil: Vallès est en proie aux pires
difficultés financières (…). En meme temps, son progrès artistique est fortement
influencé par la mort à l’âge de dix mois (…) de sa fille.13

It is perhaps for such reasons that Roger Bellet would eventually quip that Jules

Vallès’s literary project “existe sur un fond d’échec, ou de renoncement au grand roman
9
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), p. 207. Note that it is precisely on such
an iconographic timbre of melancholic anticipation that L’Insurgé closes. Having passed the (symbolic and
geographic) frontier from France to Switzerland (a ruisseau that is a disctinctly Vallésian ironic deflation of
the turgid river Styx), from life to death-in-life, the narrator states, “Je regarde le ciel du côté où je sens
Paris. / Il est d’un bleu cru, avec des nuées rouges. On dirait une grande blouse inondée de sang.” Jules
Vallès, L’Insurgé, op. cit., p. 300. This closing image evoking a kind of cosmological violence (the defeat
of those who attempted to “storm heaven”) is also a perfectly symmetrical counterpoint to the final image
of Jacques’s torn trousers from L’Enfant: “Ma mère me les apporte. Elle aperçoit mon pantalon avec un
trou et taché de sang. ” Jules Vallès, L’Enfant (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 389.
10
Roger Bellet, op. cit., pp. 410-430; Emile Zola, Oeuvres Complètes t. 4, Henri Mitterand, ed. (Paris:
Nouveau Monde éditions, 2003), p. 576: “Justice a déjà été faite d’’un grand nombre de ces misérables.
Millière, Martin, Vidal, Vallès (…) d’autres encore (…) ont été pris et fusillés hier.”
11
The number of casualties raises by a few thousand more once one factors into this macabre equation the
déportés and those who fled, like Vallès, into exile. Cf., Stewart Edwards, ed., The Communards of Paris,
1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 42.
12
England had no extradition treaty with the French government, making it, along with Belgium, a magnet
for socialist exiles in the 1870s. According to Graham Robb, there is some circumstantial evidence that
Vallès, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Marx may have frequented the same Cercle d’études sociales in Soho in
1872. Graham Robb, Rimbaud, A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000), p. 189.
13
Charles Stivale, op. cit., pp. 10-11.
 352

politique et social”.14 However, to cast this failure in a Beckettian light, it is more

appropriate to affirm, a propos of Vallès’s literary triptych, that it represents a better

failure than that which Bellet has in mind, namely, Vallès’s esthetic or political inability

to write an over-arching socio-political roman à these. For Vallès’s place in the French

canon is indisputable with regards to at least one of his novels: a stylistically innovative,

semi-autobiographical novel that is, as Bellet has put it, a “disconcerting” masterpiece of

heteroglossia: L’Enfant.15 This novel, published in 1881, constitutes the opening salvo of

what might best be conceived of as a kind of anti-bildungsroman that is more devastating

in its ironic critique of class, family, and economic relations in nineteenth-century

France than perhaps any other work before or since: a three-part oeuvre recounting the

life of a certain Jacques Vingtras as he progressively moves from member of the

provincial petite bourgeoisie of Nantes to revolutionary journalist and communard in

Paris, if not indeed to a kind of symbolic death as an exiled writer over whom hung a

quite literal death sentence.

The Trilogie is, rather than a move of social ascension, a move down into political

subjectivation; that is, the writing of the Trilogie constitutes at once the “construction of a

case” of universal equality, and the (impossible) “in-between identification”16 with le

14
Roger Bellet, “Du journal au roman: trois images Vallésiennes d’une enfance,” in Colloque Jules Vallès
(Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1975), pp. 80-1.
15
Bellet’s point, which Luke Bouvier develops in further detail in his excellent study of L’Enfant, is that
because of the insistent deployment of indirect free discourse, temporal dislocations that complicate the
task of assigning a source of enunciation to a stable narrative position (i.e., focalization shifts, sometimes
within the same paragraph, from the position of the child to that of the adult narrator), and irony, the
combined effect on the level of narrative discourse in L’Enfant is that it is quite simply impossible to know
what one is reading, or how to read it. Vladimir Jankélévitch mentions just such a confusion as being one of
the crucial “traps” of irony. Roger Bellet, “Introduction,” L’Enfant, in Jules Vallès, Oeuvres Complètes, T.
II. Cited in Luke Bouvier, Writing, Voice and the Proper: Jules Vallès and the Politics of Orality
(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Faux-Titre, 1998), p. 88. See also Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre (Paris: Seuil,
1980), pp. 10-31. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Ironie (Paris: Flammarion, 1964), pp. 127-43.
16
“ Le dèmos est à la fois le nom de la communauté et le nom de sa division (…) ; ‘la politique du peuple’
fait tort à la distribution policière des places et des fonctions parce que le peuple est toujours (…) l’un-en-
 353

peuple, which is a noun to be taken not in the sense of a substantive entity exhausted in

its denomination, but as a moveable operator for enunciating equality, for arguing over a

“wrong”. Rather than a movement towards integration within the structure of social

domination, and an acceptance of its sign systems, its mode of locating, fixing, and

containing difference, the conceptual arc and strategy of the Vallésian triptych is that of a

critique ceaselessly seeking out fault-lines through which systems of authority and

domination may be revealed as contingent, ridiculous, and possible to subvert within the

terms of its own discourse. It is thus a mode of writing that, like Rimbaud’s provocative

posture towards normative esthetic and poetic praxes, constitutes examples of what

Pascal called “l’art de fronder”. Vallès’s counter-discursive novels trouble established

political, symbolic, linguistic, and esthetic regimes in order to reveal their arbitrary

underpinnings, “leur défaut d’autorité et de justice”.17 The Triologie Vingtras, in other

words, traces and inscribes the subjective, political, and esthetic path from the infans to

the demos.

Let us begin at the end of the beginning, and take, as a case illustrating this point,

the excipit from L’Enfant. After spending a period of time studying in a Parisian internat,

where he undergoes a major identitary and political transformation that is predicated by

an encounter with a revolutionary text, namely Michelet’s history of the French

Revolution, Jacques Vingtras decides not to take the romantic route out of socio-

historical contradiction (i.e., suicide), but rather to thrust himself entirely into a struggle

plus qui brouille l’ordre de la police (…) [qui résulte d’une démonstration de l’égalité]. La construction de
ces cas d’égalité (…) est un processus de subjectivation (…) [d’un sujet] entre-deux (…): entre plusieurs
noms, statuts, ou identités (…) entre celui de l’homme de l’outil, et celui de l’être parlant et pensant. ”
Jacques Rancière, Aux Bords du politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 119.
17
Blaise Pascal, Pensées I (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 88.
 354

against the underlying violence and brutality of existing structures of authority that pass

for “natural,” and for a radical, and radically new kind of, equality:

[J]e défendrai les droits de l’enfant comme d’autres les droits de l’homme. / Je
demanderai si les pères ont liberté de vie et de mort sur l’âme de leurs fils; si M. Vingtras
a le droit de me martyriser (...); si M. Bergougnard a le droit de crever la poitrine de la
petite Louisette.18

This moment of political subjectivation upon which L’Enfant approximately

closes juxtaposes one of the foundational, revolutionary documents of modernity, the

Declaration of the Rights of Man, and its application to a category of subjects who,

strictly speaking have no rights; that is, with subjects who demonstrate the police logic of

a “wrong” in the Ranciérian sense of the term. For Rancière, the “wrong” upon which an

unequal partition of the sensible world is constituted and organized as a coherent sensory

organization depends on “miscounting” the subjects which we have theorized as the

infans/demos, on excluding them from a share in the commons, on precluding their

claims to equality.19 Vallès’s literary politics are contained in the juxtaposition of a

universal case with its constitutive exception. Such a juxtaposition transforms, within the

literary text, into a speaking subject one that was previously considered as having no

voice with(in) which to articulate its claim to the universal principle of equality.20

18
Jules Vallès, L’Enfant, op. cit., p. 383.
19
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), pp. 22-26.
20
Let us insist upon the radically subversive nature of this moment. From the perspective of cultural
historiography, Rachel Ginnis Fuchs reminds us, for example, that prior to the 1874 loi Roussel there
existed only two forms of child abuse (negatively, then, two kinds of rights for children) that were
conceived of within a strict biopolitical logic of demographic anxiety that seized the French imaginary in
the lead-up to and in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War: laws on abortion, and laws on infanticide.
The Roussel law prolongs this logic rather than modifies it in any legal sense of an expansion of rights for a
category of subjects who, like women, workers, and colonial subjects, otherwise reveal the internal
contradictions of the discourse of universal rights of man.That is, the Roussel law legislated the hygiene of
feminine bodies (specifically regarding medical visits of wet-nurses), and it is not before 1898 that any kind
of legal definition of child abuse, which is one of the principal problematics of L’Enfant, emerges to cover
cases where children are beaten, abandoned, or physically or morally neglected. Cf., Rachel G. Fuchs,
“Crimes Against Children in Nineteenth-Century France: Child Abuse,” Law and Human Behavior 6.3:4
(1982), p. 54.
 355

This preoccupation with the political equality of what we call the infans, a

category which in Vallès’s work includes children, workers, paysans, and, especially,

women, extends beyond L’Enfant to become the revolutionary filigree running through,

and linking together in a dialectical relationship, L’Enfant, Le Bachelier, and L’Insurgé.

In the crucial moment of this latter text where Vingtras relates the historical upheaval of

the “Event” of 18 March the fate of the enfant is intimately intermingled with the fate of

the Parisian working classes. This thematic disruption doubles itself up on the level of the

text itself, which becomes at this moment ontologically heterogeneous. Indeed, in the

final pages of L’Insurgé, Vallès destabilizes the formal homogeneity of the novel by

slipping into it an article that he published some fifteen years earlier. This three-fold

disruption of form, time, and discourse is stylistically typical of Vallès, and functions as a

dimension of profound temporal and textual complexity, one that quite literally and

defiantly re-writes/resuscitates/re-inscribes an article that was printed at a moment of

what we might call pure “evenementiality” – published 26 March, 1871 in Le Cri du

peuple – into a the novel published more than a decade later (1886) at the moment of the

Third Republic’s political triumph over its enemies on the right (and left).

In his article/novel, Vallès writes:

Le 18 mars te l’a sauvé belle, gamin. Tu pouvais, comme nous, grandir dans le brouillard,
patauger dans la boue, rouler dans le sang, crever de honte, avoir l’indicible douleur des
déshonorés ! C’est fini ! (…) Fils des désespérés, tu seras un homme libre !21

Vallès thus inscribes the Commune in the temporal terms of rupture and of the à-

venir, both of which are perhaps the hallmark of most French revolutionary rhetoric, from

Marat to Jaurès. However, beyond the deployment of the child-metonym as revolutionary

signifier and the reference to a former situation of voicelessness that is suspended by the

21
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 234. My italics.
 356

use of the imperfect, what is striking in this passage is Vallès’ refusal, or inability, to

truly “fix” the event in a totalizing discourse. He maintains it in a kind of entre-deux zone

that cannot be stabilized in terms of reference, thus suspending and preserving within his

text an ideal moment (of writing) where conditions of exploitation and domination were

spontaneously invalidated in the early morning of 18 March, 1871.22 As for the “event of

democracy” itself, it remains in the text a sort of grammarless, absolutely undeterminable

event; it persists as a kind of “enfance de l’événement,”23 the significance and singularity

of which Vallès can only express by referring to the “kid (…) saved in the nick of time,”

a polysemantic child whose referent is less an actual child than all those who, like Vallès,

suffered at the hands of authority from childhood through adulthood and finally “prirent

les armes contre un monde mal fait et formèrent, sous le drapeau de la Commune, la

grande fédération des douleurs.”24

No small part of the force of Vallès’s novels derives from the fact that he

illustrates quite economically a number of crucial theoretical issues that are raised

simultaneously by both democracy and literature. The author implicitly posits what

Claude Lefort has more recently theorized as the “empty space of power” in democracy,25

that is, an assertion that democracy is less an institution or even a form of government

than a radical presupposition of equality that is incommensurate with any single regime

22
That is, although the article is published in Le Cri du peuple on 26 March (the day the Commune was
elected in Parisian municipal elections), the subject of the article is the popular uprising on the butte
Montmartre on the 18th.
23
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985 (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 90. For Lyotard, the “childhood of the event” alludes to
the elusive, non-dialectical kernel of an event that cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by the event’s
mere putting-into-discourse.
24
See the dedication to the novel, L’Insurgé. Charles Stivale, analyzing the dedicaces of Vallès’ trilogy,
sees in them a point of Deleuzian molar segmentation, a node of communication amongst the texts, that
mirrors their own passage from passive humiliation to agency, linking them to one another through the
themes of (childhood) suffering, (economic) exploitation and (political) revolt. See Charles Stivale, op. cit.
25
Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique: XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 28.
 357

of democratic government or, indeed, governance. It is this constitutive vide of

democratic sovereignty to which Vallès alludes by referring to the importance of March

18, 1871 (as opposed to 26 March), with its evenemential character, its disruption of

space and function, its women, men, and children up and at arms in the wee hours of the

night, contesting the “expertise” of power. In his novel, Vallès preserves for future

readers something like a glimpse at the scandal of democracy; that is to say, we catch a

glimpse of the demos as a “supplementary” form of political identification and

democracy as the “absence même de supériorité (…) un gouvernement fondé sur rien

d’autre que l’absence de tout titre à gouverner.”26

In Vallès’s literary oeuvre, then, we have a striking example of how literature

engages with democracy, creates a space of oppositionality, opens-up an interval of

dissensus in which the political esthetically intervenes in a world that was previously

thought of as “given”. In Vallès’s novels, politics intervenes into a world where the

“given” is the object of contestation and domination is de-naturalized, de-legitimized.

With Vallès, literature is democratized, if not inherently “democratic,” though not in the

sense of some “popular art” that remains captive of the quasi-transcendental identitary

logics of a Subject revealed in artistic form. Rather, literature is democratic to the extent

that it, like the political, reveals situations of exclusion, or has the capacity to do so.

Vallès’s novels reveal torts in the strict sense in which Rancière elaborates this term. For

Rancière, torts are situations of domination that were not previously considered as having

to do with the public sphere, as being the object of a potential dissensus. What Vallès

seeks to accomplish, then, is to esthetically render visible a “monde mal fait” in order to

claim that the predicate, “mal fait,” does not reflect the metaphysical order of things, but
26
Jacques Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie (Paris : La Fabrique, 2005), p. 48.
 358

rather a historical, political contingency. Literature is not the same thing as democracy.

However, to the extent that the esthetic, like the political, is a manner of apprehending the

partage du sensible, it can open horizons for a displacement of the partage du sensible.

As Rancière postulates, “les arts ne prêtent jamais aux entreprises de la domination ou de

l’émancipation que ce qu’ils ont de commun avec elles: des positions et des mouvements

de corps, des fonctions de parole, des répartitions du visible et de l’invisible.”27

What the above passage from L’Enfant reveals is that, instead of deploying the

infans as a category of resistance, opposition can take place elsewhere, can be articulated

on the level and on the terms of a foundational “wrong”28 that inheres to a given partage

du sensible – a “wrong” that the marginalized sought to redress by citing the ideals of the

Grand Revolution, ideals which are explicitly posited as applying, universally, as much to

the marginalized, to the sans-arkhè/sans-/part, as to the bourgeoisie. As Vallès’s work

ceaselessly demonstrates, the political and the literary29 apply to the demos and to the

27
Rancière, Le Partage du sensible (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), p. 25.
28
Rancière understands the “tort” as the outcome of a police, or consensual, logic governing a given
partage du sensible that hierarchically distributes places, functions and bodies according to a naturalized
situation of inequality. For Rancière, the “mécompte” (the exclusion, or non-taking-into-account of
political actors based on their “namelessness” or their non-relationship to logos, the Aristotelian
voice/reason nexus of politics) that results from such a “wrong” can only be effectively addressed by a
prise de parole – that is, a democratic reconfiguration of the partage du sensible that insists on the equality
of speaking subjects and on the right of all speaking subjects to the sphere of the political. Whence the
significance of the appeal to the ideals of the French Revolution in the above passage. For Rancière, finally,
the role of literature in transforming consensus into the object of a polemic, of dissensus, is crucial. See
Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique, op. cit., pp. 112-126 ; Le partage du sensible, op. cit., pp. 12-
26, 64-74 ; La Haine de la démocratie, op. cit., pp. 47-62.
29
In Le Partage du sensible, as in Aux bords du politique and La Chair des mots, Rancière elaborates on
what he alternatively calls l’animal littéraire and l’homme littéraire (not the homme de lettres, but l’être
des lettres) in order to illustrate the democratic, dissensual potential of literature : “L’homme est un animal
politique parce qu’il est un animal littéraire, qui se laisse détourner de sa destination ‘naturelle’ par le
pouvoir des mots. Cette littérarité est la condition en même temps que l’effet de la circulation des énoncés
littéraires (…). Les énoncés s’emparent des corps et les détournent de leur destination (…). Aussi ne
produisent-ils pas des corps collectifs (…), plutôt ils introduisent dans les corps collectifs imaginaires des
lignes de fraction (…). Cela a toujours été, on le sait, l’obsession des gouvernants et des théoriciens du bon
gouvernement, inquiets du ‘déclassement’ produit par la circulation de l’écriture.” Rancière, Le partage du
sensible, op. cit., p. 63.
 359

infans according to the process and principle of equality that is democracy.30 Their

enunciations are not those of the animal phônè – the poor subject is not essentially

animal, merely subject of/to un-civilizable appetites – but those of intelligent, subjects

capable of participating in democracy; subjects capable of, to quote Aristotle, “deciding

the just and the unjust.”31

I. Writing in the Key of Indiscipline

Vallès’s post-Commune literary production is traversed by what we might call the

“specter” of authority,32 by the problem of defining what kind of posture to adopt vis-à-

vis its instances, apparatuses, and truth-games. Indeed, one of the persistently rich topoi

with which the opening book of the Vingtras trilogy, L’Enfant, presents the reader is the

question of how the child, a child, or the childish manage to elaborate perspectives of

resistance; how these figures manage to crack open fissures within the wall of authority

where indisciplinary attitudes (i.e., of submissive insubordination, or of uncooperative

submissiveness) become not only possible, but the veritable règle du je(u) of the text

itself.

L’Enfant represents therefore the birth of a revolt in the novel, of a kind of

revolutionary writing whose end-point is the novelized re-writing of insurrection, of the

events of the Commune itself in L’Insurgé. The most consistent stylistic characteristic of

this insurgent triptych is the deployment of irony, along with, or participating in a

heteroglossic profanation of the literary code of the novel. As Bellet puts it, the Vallésian

30
Rancière, Aux bords du politique, op. cit., p. 117.
31
Aristotle, Politics, (New York: The Barnes and Noble Library of Essential Reading, 2005), p. 4.
32
To gloss on Charles Stivale’s reading, which sees the trilogy as haunted by the failure of the 1848
revolution. Charles Stivale, “La Hantise de 1848 dans la triologie de Jacques Vingtras et Jules Vallès,” Les
Amis de Jules Vallès 5 (1987), pp. 5-14.
 360

text “plonge en enfance et se prolonge en idéologie”.33 That is, by relying on the

disruptive device of irony, the narrator of the trilogy manages to articulate critiques of

authority which, given the gap between enunciation and enunciated opened up by the use

of irony, can frequently pass unnoticed and which indeed, as the narrator states early on

in L’Enfant, manage to get the Other to “se suicider avec sa propre langue.”34 The

“Other” in question here ought not only to be taken as a given, localized figure of

authority, or merely as authority invested with a form of power that is revealed as

grotesque or arbitrary. Vallès’s undermining of these figures needs rather to be

understood as a kind of tactical engagement with power which subverts the discourse of

what Foucault called “disciplinary apparatuses”.35 The power/knowledge nexus is,

Foucault argues, strategically deployed in order to insert the body, interiority, and space-

time of an individual within a normative paradigm of institutions and discourse. It seeks

to invest:

[l]es attitudes, les gestes, les corps: [il s’agit des t]echniques de l’individualisation du
pouvoir (…) [qui vise à] surveiller quelqu’un, (…) contrôler sa conduite, son
comportement, ses aptitudes, (…) le mettre à la place où il sera plus utile […] ; [la
discipline] produit un discours sur la règle naturelle, c’est-à-dire, sur la norme.36

A subversive play of deformation and “dis-figuration,” to borrow Luke Bouvier’s

term,37of instances and instruments of domination is thus at the very heart of the

33
Roger Bellet, Jules Vallès : journaliste du Second Empire, de la Commune, et de la IIIe République,
1857-1885 (Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1977), p. 296.
34
Jules Vallès, L’Enfant, op. cit., p. 154.
35
Disciplinary power is obviously a theoretical concept that, beginning in the early 1970s, Foucault would
ceaselessly come back to in order to re-think, problematize, and modify the epistemological propositions.
The most well-known work in which an analysis, or “evenementialization,” of discipline is elaborated can
be found in Surveiller et punir, where it is defined as a specific technology of punitive power linked to a
process of saturation and an epistemologization (i.e., a key component of the functioning of disciplinary
power is its lateral link to a body of knowledge) of “normativity” in the nineteenth and 20th centuries. Cf.,
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). See also, Michel
Foucault, Dits et Ecrits II, 1976-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
36
Judith Revel, Le Vocabulaire de Foucault (Paris: Ellipses, 2001), pp. 20-1.
37
See his Writing, the Voice and the Proper, op. cit.
 361

Vallésian text, and constitutes the principal pivot around which ironic slippages of

meaning, dissemination, and ideological deterritorialization of authority function in

Vallès’s texts. Jacques Migozzi has, inter alia, taken an archeological survey of this

écriture en mode ironique in L’Enfant, a text which is indeed literally, from beginning to

end, shot through with examples of ironic disjunction.38 To add but one more, let us

consider a passage – which was the source of a revealingly absurd hermeneutical problem

that not only touches on the problem of irony, but that could also function as a meta-

commentary on the strategic deployment of this trope in Vallès’s writings – from

L’Enfant:

Il faut dire que ma mère est logique. Si on bat les enfants, c’est pour leur bien, pour qu’ils
se souviennent qu’au moment de faire une faute, ils auront les cheveux tirés (…) qu’ils
souffriront, quoi.39

A perspicacious reader of the Vallésian corpus, Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe,

was struck by the masochistic pathos of the above-passage, and comes to the rather

surprising (and erroneous) conclusion that young Vingtras is suffering from something

like a prodrome of Stockholm syndrome (a conclusion which cannot but remind us that,

as Jankélévitch put it, the “A B C” of reading the ironic text is a “salutaire méfiance”).40

This mis-reading, however, is illustrative of how the narrator of L’Enfant uses irony, that

is, the very possibility of mis-readings and misunderstandings, in order slip beyond the

grasp of authority and arrive at an unauthorized understanding. Indeed, the entire point of

38
Jacques Migozzi, “Ecritures de l’histoire, histoire de l’écriture (suite): les remaniements du texte de
L’Enfant et du Bachelier,” Revue des Amis de Jules Vallès 9 (1989), pp. 17-31.
39
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 190.
40
Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe, Un monde autre:l’enfance (Paris: Payot, 1971), pp. 197, 297, inter alia.
See also, Guillemette Tison, Une mosaïque d’enfants: l’enfant et l’adolescent dans le roman français,
1876-1890 (Artois: Presses Universitaires, 1998); See also, ibid., “Auteurs, autorités, autorité dans
L’Enfant,” La Revue des études Vallésiennes 26 (December, 1996), p. 88 ; and ibid., “L’Enfant:
l’émergence de la parole de Jacques,” Les Amis de Jules Vallès 17 (December, 1993), pp. 13-23. Vladimir
Jankélévitch, op. cit., p. 53.
 362

this passage resides in the slippage of meaning, the ironic gap of commentary that is

opened up between a narrative voice and the use of free, indirect discourse.

If we are not supremely on-guard and attentive to the phenomenon that

Jankélévitch theorized as pseudologia (i.e., a “mensonge qui se détruit de lui-même”) as

we read the trilogy, from L’Enfant to L’Insurgé, even the most astute textualist amongst

us is liable to fall into this gap, and pass paraliptically over instances of stinging critical

irony. Here, for example, Mme Vingtras’s own discourse is cited, “C’est pour ton propre

bien si je te bats,” in a manner that is less logical than tautological. There is perhaps no

better example of ideological critique than the subversive manner in which Vallès thus

locks in a kind of idiotic loop an authoritative discourse justifying the use of violence

against those who are in a position of inferiority or defenselessness. When the formula,

“c’est pour ton propre bien,” is read not as a self-justification by the dominant that

reapportions guilt, blame, on to a figure who is incapable of deciding, knowing, or saying

what is in his/her own interest; when it is read less as “this is for your own good,” and

fully read as the syntagme, “this is for your own good, so that you’ll remember that you

will be the object of a violent reprisal,” authority is less irresistibly logical than it is

simply tiré par les cheveux. The very act of citing a dominant discourse delegitimizes its

authority, creates cracks in its discursive edifice. And indeed, this ironic displacement of

the discourse of authority weaves its way straight through to the Insurgé, where the

intertextuality of authority is not only explicitly politicized, but deeply revolutionary. In a

discourse on Balzac41 that swiftly shunts off into an anarcho-socialist peroration,

41
Balzac is an interesting intertextual figure that casts a long shadow in the Vingtras trilogy. This should
not be all that surprising, as Balzac was a kind of novelistic Ur-Vater for many a nineteenth-century author,
from Stendhal [cf., La Vie de Henry Brulard] to Zola, whose own novelistic corpus exists in a kind of
neurotic tension with the Comédie Humaine. As we alluded to earlier, in some sense, Jacques Vingtras’s
 363

Vingtras/Vallès writes: “ces imbéciles me laissent insulter leur religion et leurs doctrines

parce que je le fais dans un langage qui respecte leur rhétorique et que prônent les

maitres du barreau.”42 What is at stake, then, is not so much finding a language that

would be oppositional, engaging in a kind of frontal assault on authority, but rather

locating within the dominant discourse itself instances of heterogeneity, of an

unauthorized circulation of counter-discursivity that subverts the dominant from within,

from beneath. Thus it is that “respectful language,” language as a sort of

disciplinary/ideological apparatus, or relay of norms, can also be converted from a

grammar of oppression into an utterance of emancipation. Note, for example, that in this

passage, by a skillful metonymical association, a double subversion takes place when

both “rhetoric” (i.e., a normative discourse interiorized in school) and the language of the

Law (i.e., of the “maîtres du barreau”) are turned against themselves.

Jean-François Tétu is therefore quite correct to draw our attention to the fact that,

on a thematic and structural level, part (if not most) of the force of Vallès’s oeuvre stems

from the fact that it constantly manages to pull off a complex symbolic permutation in the

course of which sites of domination become sites of insurrection.43 We might even put a

slight amount of pressure on this proposition, and argue the following: the written text

anti-bildungsroman is plotted in a way that in some real sense manages to valorize the downfall of figures
such as Lucien de Rubempré. In Le Bachelier, what’s more, Jacques Vingtras seeks out, and then rents, a
dingy Parisian apartment in the Hôtel Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which, according to the textual indications
in Illusions perdues, Lucien de Rubempré lived, in the hopes of re-enacting/re-writing the triumphant
moment of exultant defiance with which Père Goriot culminates: “À nous deux maintenant!” As Bouvier
remarks,the room, unfortunately, offers no such heights, but rather the anticlimactic view of a wall stained
with pigeon feces. The irony here, however, has something rather distinctly Balzacian to it: we’ll recall
that, after launching his famous ultimatum to the city from the heights of Père Lachaise, Eugène de
Rastignac somewhat un-defiantly goes to dinner with the same daughters who “devoured” their father’s
fortune. Jules Vallès, Le Bachelier, in Oeuvres Complètes, II, ed. Roger Bellet (Paris: Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1975-1990), pp. 552-3. See also, Luke Bouvier, op. cit., p. 72.
42
Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé, op. cit., pp. 79-80. Emphasis mine.
43
Jean-François Tétu, “Aspects de l’idéologie de la révolte chez Jules Vallès,” Colloque Jules Vallès, op.
cit., p. 101.
 364

itself, that is, as Michel Foucault reminds us, discourse constitutes a very real field where

power-relations are (re)configured, negotiated, and contested. Thus, Vallès’s trilogy

plunges into the defeat of History and politics and prolongs itself into the domain of

literature and a politics of literarity. That is, it plunges into a field of discourse where the

authority of the “discours vrai” is undermined through the mobilization of puns, irony,

dis-figuration/devenir-autre, and the intrusion into the text of a use of free indirect

discourse that blurs temporal and enunciative boundaries.44

As such, the following analysis shall be in part informed by the Foucaultian tenet

which holds that “le discours n’est pas simplement ce qui traduit les luttes ou les

systèmes de domination, mais ce pour quoi, ce par quoi on lutte, le pouvoir dont on

cherche à s’emparer.”45 In the next section, therefore, we shall briefly engage with the

various representations of institutions of authority/discipline in L’Enfant, of which an

important instance can be located in the bourgeois family. Following this analysis further,

we will attempt to grasp the critical stakes of Vallès’s literary politics as they become

increasingly specific and explicit towards the end of his life. In our final section, then, we

shall examine the links between literature and democracy in Vallès’s trilogy, and the

tactics by which certain hypostasizing literary representations of children (and of the

childish) are dismantled. Let us state straight away, however, that we are not proposing a

developmentalist or teleological approach to the Vallésian oeuvre, in which the Enfant

would be somehow less engaged with a struggle for equality that is the hallmark of

Vallès’s writings throughout his career as a journalist and novelist. On the contrary, such

44
For a delightful analysis of the critical and psychological importance of la blague in Vallès’s trilogy, see
Walter Redfern, French Laughter: Literary Humor from Diderot to Tournier (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), pp. 105-120.
45
Michel Foucault, “L’Ordre du discours,” in Philosophie: anthologie (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 365,
368-9.
 365

a methodology would lapse into the same sort of anachronistic heuristics that we have

early critiqued in the reception of Rimbaud’s verse poetry. Furthermore, such a

perspective, present no doubt in the canonization of L’Enfant at the expense of the

subsequent installments of the trilogy, would miss the key point of the entire literary

enterprise, the point of departure for which is a relentless critique of the child both as a

literary figure and as an ideological/phantasmatic vector for bourgeois norms of the

family. This child, Vallès suggests, is but one node along an axis of figures and subject

positions in the nineteenth century whose access to discourse, to self-representation is

problematically restricted at best: i.e., workers, women, criminals, madmen,

homosexuals, the colonial Other, in a word, the infans/demos. It is this infantile figure,

not a “real” subject, but an objectivized subject, that Vallès sets out to interrogate in

L’Enfant with the expectation that, like a house of cards, once one begins to make the

base tremble, the structure itself risks collapsing.

Such a subversion is accomplished in at least two manners: first, through a

representational strategy of devenir-autre (or, to borrow Bouvier’s lexicon, of dis-

figuration) that allows the child-subject to escape a fundamentally alienating situation. As

Marina van Zuylen has suggested in her interrogation of the use of disfiguration in

L’Enfant, such a deployment of alterity, through which the child metaphorically becomes

an animal or an object, has a function that is close to the Brecht’s use of strategic

alienation, or Verfremdungseffekt, or, a re-deployment of alienation with the two-fold aim

of anticipating any facile emotional response and soliciting the audience/readership’s

critical capacity.46 Along with a nearly non-stop reliance on antiphrastic irony and puns

46
Marina van Zuylen, “Pour une esthétique du comique: L’Enfant de Jules Vallès,” Études Françaises
32 :3 (1996), p. 145. This othering of the figure of the child, however, ought rightly to be understood as a
 366

that deform the language of authority, including that of narrative authority, this devenir-

autre constitutes a form, or procedure, of resistance that takes place on the level of the

signifier itself and allows Vingtras/Vallès to assume a posture of subjective indiscipline

throughout the trilogy. “Indiscipline” is to be understood, in this context, rather along the

lines of its deployment in Michel Foucault’s critical corpus (i.e., as a positive category)

than in its nineteenth-century acceptation (which was conceived of in purely negative

terms of “lack”).47 Such a methodological and theoretical choice seems preferable, and

indeed necessary for thinking about indiscipline as a semiotic activity that produces a

textual tone or theme capable of drawing our attention to the “child’s” capacity to resist,

critique, and undermine authority, whether it be located in a specific personage

metonymically representing paternalistic authority, or in the discourses that these

representatives “parrot”.48 In other words, such an approach to the problematic of

indiscipline posits the concept as the occasion of dynamic discursive agency which, as

strategic extension of the deployment of irony that is coherent with the rest of the trilogy, a point which van
Zuylen does not insist upon forcefully enough in her otherwise insightful reading of L’Enfant. As
Jankélévitch affirms, one of the foundational tropes of irony, antiphrasis, is nothing other than a dialectical
insistence upon alterity: “Entre les possibles que l’intelligence lui donne à choisir, l’ironie choisit l’altérité
la plus aiguë: elle exprime non pas quelque chose d’autre que ce qu’elle pense, comme n’importe quelle
allégorie, mais le contraire, ce qui est l’autre le plus autre (…). Elle est antégorie en cela.” Vladimir
Jankélévitch, op. cit., p. 71.
47
I.e., as a “manque de discipline,” according to the 1835 Dictionnaire de l’Académie Francaise (the 1872-
77 Littré gives the same series of definitions for a period approximately contemporaneous to the writing of
the trilogy):
http://colet.uchicago.edu.floyd.lib.umn.edu/cgibin/dico1look.pl?strippedhw=indiscipline&dicoid=ACAD18
35. Consulted, 08/30/2010.
48
The theme of “parroting” is an important one in Vallès, and ought to be properly understood along the
lines of an ideological critique. See chapter XXI in L’Enfant, in which Vingtras ironically draws attention
to the fact that one of his school devoirs is to explore the theme of the “death of a parrot” in a Latin
translation exercise, and which ends with the affirmation of a singular voice freed from the rhetorical and
discursive “dead-weight” (i.e., in the sense of a “nightmare weighing on the brain of the living,” as Marx
might put it) of “les anciens”. In other words, Vingtras here, in a self-reflexive scene of writing in a dead
language, begins to write stricto sensu with a stylistic verve that is all his own, deploying an absurd
imagery of mourners planting parsley on the tomb of a parrot and ironically citing the Latin poet Virgil. In
this same, crucial chapter, Vingtras begins a scandalous sexual liaison with a much older bourgeois woman.
Jules Vallès, op. cit., pp. 305-6. See also, Guillemette Tison, “L’Enfant: l’émergence de la parole de
Jacques,” art. cit.
 367

Judith Revel eloquently states, “réussit de manière volontaire ou fortuite à tenir en échec

les dispositifs d’identification, de classification, de normalization du discours.”49 This

indiscipline (in its various iterations as irony or devenir-autre) is therefore the very

lynchpin of the Vingtras triology: from the opening pages of L’Enfant to the final

sentence of L’Insurgé, it is a distinct mode of literary engagement with opposition

politics and revolt that merits our sustained attention.

II. Family (and) Discipline

C’est un sujet – à traiter même en pièces – la famille!

- Jules Vallès

As Deleuze and Guattari prudently suggest, we would do well to be slightly

suspicious of those family triads that are a little too perfectly triangular for their own

good.50 Readers have been wont to point out that the Vallès (or, Vallez) family was in

actual fact quite large.51 Hence, the literary reduction of the family has struck some

readers with an eye towards biographical groundings52 and factuality: why this surprising

49
Judith Revel, op. cit., p. 53.
50
See their, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
especially their remarks on the function of the father in Kafka on pages 11-12.
51
Most of Jules Vallès’s siblings died while they were still infants. There were, however, a sum total of
seven of them, the names of which it would be prudent to enumerate here for a further analysis of the
episode in L’Enfant in which a young girl named Louisette is beaten to death by her father. Vallès’s
brothers and sisters were named: Jean-Louis, Joseph-Jules, Louis-Jules (i.e., Jules Vallès himself), Jean-
Emile, Marie-Louise (she who was interned for madness in 1853), Thomas-Jean-Louis, and Eliza-
Joséphine. According to Daniel Zimmerman, most of these children died in the care of a wet-nurse (which
was indeed in some instances tantamount to a death sentence in some regions of France in the mid-to-late
nineteenth century) named Rosalie Pascal in the village of Farreyrolles. Whence perhaps some of the
ambivalence of the interrogation that opens the novels first paragraph. The emphasis here is placed on the
“perhaps” to the extent that the ambiguity surrounding the question of maternity, identity, and nourishment
(“Ai-je été nourri par ma mère? Est-ce une paysanne qui m’a donné son lait?”) could also quite legitimately
be taken in the sense of a rhetorical question, or a question that affirms more than it puts into question.
Indeed, despite the re-writing of the “family romance” that would seek to efface any trace of the family’s
impoverished origins amongst the paysannerie, the mother and, by extension, the child are not members of
the bourgeoisie, but of the rural working-classes. See Daniel Zimmerman, Jules Vallès: l’irrégulier (Paris:
Le Cherche Midi, 1998), pp. 15-16.
52
Walter Redfern, “L’Enfant: un roman vrai,” Revue des études Vallésiennes 26 (December, 1998).
 368

reductio ad minima of the family to its minimal, one is almost tempted to say, structural

features?

Denis Labouret has, in response to this question, offered a potentially insightful

hypothesis, in sum affirming that such a reduction has not so much a referential goal as it

does a polemical and analytical telos, namely, that of underscoring the fundamental truth

of the “family” as its functional dependence on violence.53

We should take Labouret’s insight a step further, and argue then that this “family”

is obviously to be taken in an institutional sense. Yet its “violence” extends in a direction

that includes the violence of patriarchy and class conflict. It is the bourgeois family

model qua class institution in its interconnectivity with other instances of nineteenth-

century authority/domination along a continuum of disciplinary power that is targeted

here: along with the family, the school, the discourse of the Law, of medicine, psychiatry,

etc. Vallès does not by any stretch of the imagination conceive of the family as existing

in some sort of divorce, at a remove from other spheres of power.54 Quite to the contrary,

in his career as a journalist, the author himself explicitly remarked upon what he

perceived of as a vicious interface dialectically linking power to knowledge in the

institution of the school: “l’enseignement de l’État participe de l’autorité de l’État.” It

should be noted that these circles of disciplinary authority necessarily imply the presence

of the church in mid-nineteenth-century France. In the same article, published in Le

Figaro in 1868, Vallès writes: “Ne savez-vous donc pas que dans les villes le rectorat

végète à l’ombre de l’évêché, qu’au ministère même les destitutions cruelles arrivent (…)

53
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 41, n. 1.
54
Such a reading would be all the more tendentious to the extent that the Father in L’Enfant is also a “pion,”
or secondary-school teacher in Jacques’s school – the two spheres of discipline are, therefore, explicitly
collapsed.
 369

par la main potelée des prélats ?”55 By a sort of logical extension, then, we should

understand that calling into question the legitimacy of one of these institutions, or

instances, of power, necessarily involves questioning the other strata, sediments and

series of power with which they overlap and interact. Paternal authority involves, in

Vallès’s analysis, disciplinary techniques of power and normalization common to the

school, which is a relay of State power, which is in turn sedimented by the socially

conservative Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.

An in-depth study of the intricate relations linking the family to sites of

disciplinary power could easily run several hundred pages long. Thus, in the space of the

following pages our attention shall rest on the manner in which the family in L’Enfant is

represented as an important, if deeply unstable, relay that functions for the most part in a

way that homogenizes the actors and effects of power, making it the privileged site of not

only a form of governmentality that takes the child as its lynchpin,56 but also a privileged

site of critique where the norms of the bourgeois family essentially undo themselves.

Thus, though Vallès/Vingtras indeed tends to suggest that the violence of the family is

“exemplary,” this exemplarity is far from being the prerogative of the family. Quite to the

contrary, throughout the first novel of the triology, L’Enfant, violence in the family, in

the school, and indeed amongst social classes57 constitutes the ultimate logic, but also the

55
Cited in, Roger Bellet, op. cit., p. 299.
56
This is, broadly speaking, Jacques Donzelot’s argument (itself, drawing on the pathbreaking
historiographico-theoretical work of Michel Foucault from the early 1970s). See Jacques Donzelot, The
Policing of Families (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 42-82.
57
I.e., between the working-classes and the bourgeoisie, but also between urban identity and para-urban
(i.e., working-class) and rural identity. It is precisely with this latter tension that novel opens on the tone of
a symbolic interrogation, but one is also reminded of the scene in L’Enfant where Mme Vingtras dances a
bourrée (a traditional Auvergnat dance) during a dinner party to the utter horror of her husband, whose
social ambitions and socio-symbolic status (i.e., as head of a household) are placed in dangerous
suspension by the return of a peasant sociolect posited as a maternal and minor mode of signifying which
 370

inherent implicit limit of virtually every apparatus of subjugation/subjectivation. This is

particularly the case of the school, the first description of which in L’Enfant comes in the

form of a narrative juxtaposition with a prison. The result, of course, is that a coincidence

is ultimately drawn between the two sites of discipline that becomes an explicit

apposition within the text: “Il donnait, comme tous les collèges, comme toutes les

prisons, sur une rue obscure.”58 And this obscure path certainly falls prey to its own

polysemic play, shifting from metonymical detail, to metaphor anticipating the failures of

the Bachelier, in which this ominous road leads directly to poverty, famishment, and

economic exploitation, before finally becoming a kind of Garguantuesque monster of

normativity, consuming the raw material of indisciplined subjects and spewing out a

bulimic flow of objets assujettis: “le collège moisit, sue l’ennui, et pue l’encre; les gens

qui entrent, ceux qui sortent, éteignent leur regard, leur voix, leur pas, pour ne pas blesser

la discipline.”59

As Philippe Ariès underscored in his innovative historico-epistemological

genealogies of childhood, it is towards the end of the eighteenth century in Europe that

we might say that something like the ideological specificity, function, and category of

“childhood,” or the “child,” emerges. It is thus at the point of a two-fold transition into

the chaotic space-time of modernity and capitalism, that the child begins to be that locus

at which a barrier is constructed between the bourgeoisie and a troubling proximity,

indeed intimacy with the poor:

La famille achevait de se réorganiser autour de l’enfant, et dressait

entre elle et la société le mur de la vie privée (…) La famille moderne a
retiré de la vie commune non seulement les enfants, mais aussi (…) les

calls into question M. Vingtras’s virility, his “mollèche” (i.e., mollesse). Cf., Jules Vallès, L’Enfant, op.
cit., pp. 272-5
58
Ibid., p.58.
59
Ibid., p. 59.
 371

adultes (…) [parce que] il vint un temps où la bourgeoisie n’a plus

supporté la pression de la multitude ni le contact du peuple. Elle a fait
sécession ; elle s’est retirée de la vaste société polymorphe pour
s’organiser à part (…) gardée de toute contamination populaire.60

Although taking his analysis in quite different direction, Jacques Donzelot will

essentially adopt a similar argument with respect to the child in the nineteenth century (an

argument which itself owes much to Foucault’s work on psychiatric power and

abnormality in the course of the nineteenth century). Donzelot is drawn to a phenomenon

of “resserrement tactique” based on a principle of separation and surveillance of

differential spaces maintaining distance between inside and outside, family and servants,

and within family itself along axes of age, gender, etc.61 Thus, in his view, the bourgeois

house becomes an analytical space that extends out into and opens itself to other

disciplinary institutions and discourses which all more or less (depending on the

specificity of one’s class) share the same objective of creating a unique space-time of the

bourgeois subject that has a single-minded objective, namely, tracing a cordon sanitaire

around the figure of the (“innocent”) child.62

Given this class-bound importance and specificity of the child in the nineteenth

century, it is thus far from surprising that, in L’Enfant, we should see Jacques and his

family in a kind of perpetual cycle of attraction and repulsion when it comes to this

movement of strategic social retraction from the space of the “common”. Neither should

it come as any surprise that the school, as both locus and regime of discipline, and the

family, from which it is inextricable, should furnish the principal targets of

60
Philippe Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), pp. 312-
316.
61
Jacques Donzelot, op. cit., p. 46. See, Michel Foucault Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1973-74 (New York: Picador, 2008); and Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975
(London: Verso, 2003)
62
Ibid.: “On demande au logement de devenir une pièce complémentaire de l’école dans le contrôle des
enfants (…), que l’on puisse les y immobiliser.”
 372

Vallès/Vingtras’s ironic critiques. Indeed, effects, or moments of restriction of the child’s

space, time, desire, and needs are so omnipresent in L’Enfant that they come to represent

something like a structural isotopia of the novel. Jacques is the object of an apparently

endless series of surveillance of some kind. He constantly is being kept after school to

write pensums; he is forced to wear clothes that don’t fit, or that are so many

“grammatical errors,” to take the vestimentary in the sense of a Barthesian code; he

seems also to be perpetually famished (i.e,, deprived of food), or eating something

distasteful, such as, in one truly scathing passage that parodies the bourgeois ethics of

self-sacrifice and thrift, onions.63

There are, however, two particularly illustrative instances that put into stark relief

both the spatialization of class boundaries erected around/through the figure of the child,

and their systematic breakdown by the child. Let us begin by considering that metonym

par excellence of bourgeois propriety that is private property. Revealingly, from the very

first descriptions of the house that the Vingtras family inhabits, this space is assigned the

same metonymical value as the school. It is a kind of prison, if not worse: “La maison

que nous habitons est dans une rue sale, pénible à gravir (…); la prison est au bout de la

rue.”64 In a typical(ly delightful) Vallésian paradox, given the choice between family and

prison, the narrator affirms that one would have to opt for prison, “parce que c’est plus

gai.”65 And yet, this analogy ceases to function rhetorically by the text’s excipit, when,

after having been brought back to Nantes from Paris following a failed baccalaureat exam

and expressing to his father a desire that virtually menaces the latter’s hopes for social

ascension into the bourgeoisie (“Je veux être un ouvrier,” affirms Jacques in a note to his

63
Jules Vallès, op. cit., pp. 144-5.
64
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 38.
65
Ibid., p. 39.
 373

father), this familial space reveals itself to be an actual space of incarceration. In a series

of passages that seem to target the implicit, constant, structural violence of the family,

and indeed of bourgeois patriarchy, the lexical field becomes increasingly saturated with

a prison vocabulary, as Jacques refers to himself as a “gibier de prison”. The underlying

suggestion is that, in final analysis, the constant, invisible, structural violence of class is

significantly more nefarious than the episodic physical violence the mother metes out to

the body of her child, and which in essence can be more easily resisted and rejected for

their visibility. As Hannah Arendt affirmed in her analysis of violence, those who have

recourse to violence do nothing more than reveal an absence of legitimacy. In sum, the

use of violence reveals a very loose hold on power indeed.66 As the description of this

maison-bagne culminates, it is thus crucial that Jacques’s father “taps on” a copy of the

Napoleonic code, for in this gesture the scope of the social critique being articulated

explicitly broadens beyond the subjective violence of the bourgeois family to include the

objective, systemic, and political nature of domination.67

Still, what distinguishes the Vallésian text from any number of its nineteenth-

century analogues are the crucial questions of mobility, agency, and laughter. For

L’Enfant is hardly Vipère au poing, and even less Poil de Carotte. That is, if childhood is

here decidedly unromantic, unsentimental, it cannot be said that the child is portrayed as

a helpless victim, even when this may be objectively the case, given that Jacques

occupies an unfavorable position on the reticulated line of power relations. Quite to the

contrary, Jacques Vingtras appears to embody (even if the childish body is somewhat

semiotically chaotic, as we shall see) a Foucaultian statement on power: notably, that

66
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York and London: Harvest Books, 1970), pp. 44-7.
67
Jules Vallès, L’Enfant, op. cit., p. 373.
 374

power is what renders relations amongst agents possible; it is what preserves these

relations from being simple questions of domination and obedience.68 Thus,

misérabilisme as a semiotic technique for representing and formulating truth-statements

vis-à-vis class alterity is also repudiated in the Vallésian text. This is forcefully the case

in a chapter that is quite literally carnavalesque, and which, furthermore, troubles the

binary political categories of the conservative countryside and the purportedly politically

progressive metropolitan centers.

In a chapter entitled “Braves Gens” one would expect to be on the amusing end of

a no-holds-barred barrage of ironic umbrage. “Braves gens,” even today, continues to

alternatively evoke either an Old Goriot type of voluntary naiveté, or a Mr. Homais

imaginary of shallow, bourgeois insipidness, of the rote monotony of provincial

conformity to middle-class convention. In sum, we might reasonably expect that the

antiphrastic referent of “braves gens” would have been the famille Vingtras itself as it

moved into a new apartment in Saint-Étienne. And yet, in a characteristically Vallésian

gesture of displacement, the semantico-social value, and class valorization, of this term is

quite simply emptied out and displaced. It will return in its decidedly more ironic mode a

few pages further, when it is deployed as an antiphrastic epithet for Mme Vingtras’s

exaggerated sense of bourgeois economy. After complaining about having to spend two

francs on a cast for her son’s broken arm, Vingtras/Vallès metaleptically intervenes with

the following commentary which is, of course, intended as a purely self-contradictory

68
Michel Foucault, “Précisions sur le pouvoir – réponses à certaines critiques,” in op. cit., pp.631-2. With
respect to the pair Jacques/M. Vingtras, one might be tempted to mobilize Hannah Arendt’s theoretical
problematization of the distinction between power and violence (and, of course, authority). To the precise
extent, for example, that M. Vingtras beats his son, i.e., mobilizes violence against a weaker subject who
enjoys no positive rights (i.e., the infans who incarnates the legal and epistemological excess of the sans-
part), he commensurately becomes a target of critical parody, satire, and resentment that radically saps
away at the (contingent, performative) foundation of his authority. I.e., the more violence is used, the less
power the father actually symbolically enjoys. Cf., Hannah Arendt, op. cit., pp. 35-54.
 375

statement whose subversive meaning the reader must disengage: “Brave femme qui

voulait de l’économie dans son ménage.”69

In the strictly counter-discursive economy that interests us, however, “brave

gens” is given a positive valence when it is transferred first onto a single mother, that is, a

woman with children who is not a widow, living on the rez-de-chaussée of the building

where the Vingtras family resides, and a family of workers on another floor, the Fabres,

with whom Jacques attempts to create an alternate surrogate family, a kind of anti-family

romance where the real father is not a king, but a worker, and where collective working-

class identity formations draw a stark contrast with the bourgeoisie: “Braves gens. Ils

juraient, sacraient, en lâchait des salées. (…) [I]ls avaient la main noire, mais le cœur

dessus; (…) ils me donnaient l’envie d’être ouvrier aussi, et de vivre cette bonne vie où

l’on n’avait peur ni de sa mère, ni des riches (…).”70

It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that in this chapter, during an episode

occurring on mardi gras, we find something that resembles a sort of auto-parodic, textual

anticipation of the final book of the trilogy, that is, the episode of the Paris Commune

recounted in L’Insurgé.71 The chapter begins with the ominous and exceptional

affirmation: “ma mère n’a pas eu le temps de m’enfermer.”72 Upon hearing rumors that

an “invading force” of children from the next street over have the intention to destroy the

neighborhood coal pile that is coiffed with a bonnet and a fuse on mardi gras, Vingtras

and the neighborhood children erect a little barricade in their street, and arm themselves

69
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 127.
70
Ibid., pp. 121-2.
71
The Commune, which Lenin once called the “festival of the oppressed,” also infamously ended in a
desperate attempt to defend a city neighborhood by neighborhood “on the barricades (…) until the last
paving stone”. See Stewart Edwards, op. cit., especially the chapter, “The Festival of the Oppressed,”
beginning on p.140.
72
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 125.
 376

with sling-shots to defend themselves from the “enemy” (significantly, the term in French

is fronde, which cannot help but mobilize a political imaginary of insurrectional

opposition to the monarchy). Mistakenly believing himself to be the sole defender against

an overwhelming invading force, Jacques lets loose a wild barrage of stones that manage

to (nevertheless) accomplish the carnavalesque, revolutionary gesture “d’interrompre

l’existence normale d’une ville”. As Luke Bouvier has eloquently put it, barricades may

be taken as a kind of counter-narrative themselves – a form of impromptu writing on the

very surface of urban space itself that creates and preserves “a space of alterity, which

impedes ‘proper’ history from moving forward until their collapse.”73

Eventually, however, disaster strikes: “j’ai entendu des carreaux tomber, j’ai vu

un caillou entrer dans une chambre; j’ai peut-être tué quelqu’un. On ne riposte pas ! Je

me suis donc trompé; (…) je vais être jugé, mon père perdra sa place.”74

Now, we might be tempted to read this last phrase as an instance of how the

interiorization of class norms has successfully taken place. Like any child who

unintentionally breaks a window, the child constructs an obscure fantasy of unfathomable

punishment that runs the gamut from the imaginary murder of an innocent by-stander,75

to the judgment of adults and indeed the social disintegration of the Father’s place in

society. From a psychoanalytically oriented perspective, then, we might say that Jacques

hardly mistook his target (se tromper) at all, but was aiming indeed at some point within

the paternal edifice of authority (i.e., here the house, which, as Freud states, is frequently

73
Luke Bouvier, op. cit., p. 58.
74
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 126.
75
Let us point out that this anxiety stemming from the conjunction of symbolic authority and the violence
of revolution constitutes in its own right a thematic current in the Vingtras trilogy, and is especially
pronounced in L’Insurgé when Jacques receives a mandate to command a unit of the National Guard
(which he does unsuccessfully).
 377

the residual signifier of a [maternal] body one attempted to climb-up as a child in dream-

work)76 that was more fragile, more susceptible to interruption, than others. From the

strict perspective of historical socio-political practices, Donzelot might remind us that, in

provincial nineteenth-century France, such an anxiety, of a child for provoking the social

destitution of his father, was hardly unfounded, and was indeed an embedded aspect of

the (class) community’s practical functioning: “l’inscription directe (…) de la famille

dans le champs politique a [une] consequenc[e] quant à l’exercice du pouvoir social: (…)

le père répond de ses membres.”77

Thus, we might be tempted to see in this passage the articulation of a fear of

seeing his family “de-classed,” or classed otherwise (i.e., as the other, as it were). In a

word, we might detect in this paragraph the positive functioning of a normative apparatus

of power whose rules have been interiorized by the child. However, as the fluctuation of

narrative time and positions from interior-focalization in the present of narration to

indirect free discourse at the moment of the narrated suggests, a kind of gap opens up that

allows a victory to in fact take place where the “child” appears to have missed his target.

In playing at – or is it a répétition in the theatrical sense? – revolution, the text manages

to metonymically shatter the illusory uniformity of the “house/foyer,” and to create a

fissure on the level of surface appearances (i.e., the carreau), on the level, then, of

ideology. What’s more, this simulacrum of revolutionary violence undoes the separation

(etymologically, krinein, critique) of class spheres by contaminating that space par

excellence of private life, la chambre, with une pierre, that is, with a metonymical

signifier of revolt. Thus, an important, if subtle, tension begins to assert itself in the text,

76
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, James Strachey, trans. (Basic Books, 2010), pp. 211-12,
368, 383.
77
Jacques Donzelot, op. cit., p.49.
 378

one in which private and public, family and social, outside and inside are less

distinguishable than they are intermingled by the child. Though he misses his perceived

“enemies,” the child opens all the same a gap within the very space of his

“enfermement,” and thus problematizes through its very illustration the attempt by the

bourgeoisie to retreat altogether from the socially heterogenous space of the street.

The consequences for this ideological subversion of space are not physical. In a

properly Foucaultian twist (i.e., one that aims at inner correction, at individuation and

classification rather than punctual punishment of ruptures in the realm of legality or licit

acts), they are much worse:

On ne me frappa pas – on fit pire (…) elle souffrait de me voir trainer dans un monde de
cordonniers, et depuis quelques semaines elle nourrissait le projet de m’en détacher (…)
‘je ne veux pas le battre, reprit ma mère, mais comme je sais qu’il se plaît bien avec vos
fils, je l’empêcherai de les voir ; ce serait une bonne correction’. Les Fabre ne
répondaient rien, - les pauvres gens ne se croyaient pas le droit de discuter les résolutions
d’une femme de professeur de collège78

Crucially, an imbalance with respect to speech, with respect to the critical

capacity to respond, is put into relief here. Mme Vingtras speaks, the Fabres remain

silent, or implicitly have no “right,” as poor workers whose children have “corrupted” the

son of a school teacher and a “brave femme,” to respond. Likewise, the child himself can

only listen silently in the corridor, in a contradictory position of both marginalization and

surveillance. This paradoxical sans-part positionality of the child is perhaps the very

reason for which the child’s response to this fundamental scene of inequality and class

discipline is, “je compris leur silence”. The implicit suggestion is, of course, that Jacques

understands this silence because it is the shared silence of the marginalized, of the

disadvantaged, of the infans/demos.

78
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 128.
 379

Nevertheless, another moment in the above-citation solicits our attention. First,

notice that there emerge two forms of suffering: that of the child, and that, perhaps

somewhat more surprising, of the mother. For the former, the suffering in question stems

from a deprivation, an imposed lack (i.e., that of being able to play with the Fabre

children), and one should perhaps take quite seriously the fact that this is practically the

sole instance in the text in which the narrative voice significantly calls into question the

mother’s love for her child: “il me semblait que ma mere commettait là une cruauté, était

méchante.”79 Yet this is an excessively complex passage, one that can only be reduced to

questions of maternal care or cruelty at the risk of creating a reductive reading of the

text’s inner logic, particularly when it comes to the ambivalent rapport between the

mother and the son.80

As Bouvier has convincingly argued,81 there is an undeniable, if unintentional,

complicity between Jacques and his mother who, in many serious respects, is every bit as

socially, symbolically, and linguistically maladroit as her son is. In a quite concrete

sense, Mme Vingtras, in her zealous efforts to inculcate bourgeois norms of class

propriety into her son (efforts which nearly always involve a kind of burlesque disruption

or subversion of the very codes she aims to reproduce), be it those of proper dress, thrift,

moderation of pleasure, Mme Vingtras inevitably produces precisely the opposite effect:

rather than acceptance, critique; rather than normal or normative, class domination passes

for aberrant and cruel, ridiculous, arbitrary, and predicated in final analysis on the use or

79
Ibid., p. 130.
80
This is indeed one critique one might legitimately level at Elisabeth Badinter’s reading of Mme Vingtras
in her L’Amour en plus.
81
Luke Bouvier, op. cit., p. 109: “Jacques’s mother unwittingly pushes [the] discourse [of bourgeois
propriety] to the point of caricature and mime (…), attempt[ing] to initiate Jacques into the signs of his
class identity, [she] only succeeds in introducing him to the subversion of those signs.” See also, p. 123, on
the scene of the recital of Homer and the mother’s disastrous attempt to clean Jacques’s nasal cavities.
 380

threat of violence. The mother, then, is an absolutely indispensable instance of authority

that is, at base, responsible for forming the child’s profound intolerance for injustice,

deep yearning for equality, and affiliation for working-class collectives. In a word, who,

in the entire Vingtras trilogy, could be more (inadvertently) responsible for the child’s

becoming an insurgent, for the eventual subjective and political shift from infans to

demos? It is precisely in the light of this complicity with an accidental maternal order of

subversions that we must juxtapose what could pass for one of many ironic, anti-

disciplinary maxims in L’Enfant, “ma mere, qui marchait avec son siècle, m’inspirait la

haine des armées permanentes.”82 Such a passage occurs like so many others in the

context of Jacques taking an unintended moral from an exemplary lesson in bourgeois

economy. Mme Vingtras keeps the money Jacques earns from school prizes in a piggy-

bank so that, eventually, it can be used to buy him a replacement in the army. The fact

that this exemplary lesson of budgeting results in a powerful critique of class relations

rather than an endorsement of bourgeois thrift might pass as par for the ironic course in

L’Enfant. However, this anti-militarist sentiment and sense of indignation before the

impôt de sang placed on the poor, must not be divorced from its larger, infratextual

context, or its connection to the last book of the trilogy, L’Insurgé. Indeed, this inner

hatred of standing armies becomes a form of active resistance taking place through a

form of writing that inscribes a series of symbolic deformations, of proper names and

gender that render the subject illegible for the State, and potentially, indeed, undermine

the State apparatus’s capacity to conscript soldiers. As Bouvier points out, Vallès lets a

form of textual subversion, or “fictionality,” infiltrate the apparatus of State power

82
Jules Vallès, L’Enfant, op. cit., p. 91.
 381

precisely due to an indisciplinary mode of writing, a “negligence de plume”.83 Taking a

job copying down certificates of birth and marriage at a local mairie, the maternally-

inspired lesson of anti-militarism returns, nearly verbatim, with a vengeance: “Quand

mon collègue n’est pas là, je me relâche à ma facon. (…) [I]l pourra y avoir dans vingt et

un ans des filles qui seront appellées et des garçons qu’on laissera tranquilles parce qu’ils

auront été inscrits sous le nom de Marguerite (…) ; je penche pour inscrire comme filles

les nouveau-nés, étant contre les armées permanentes.”84

Mme Vingtras’s socio-symbolic and textual position is thus far from stable. She is

a complex figure who perhaps more than anything sees in her child a constant source of

anxiety stemming from her own recent and tenuous socio-economic ascension from the

situation of peasant to the wife of a school teacher. As a woman in nineteenth-century

France, Mme Vingtras too is the victim of structural instances of inequality that pass for

“natural differences”. As a mère de famille, she may be, as Donzelot, Foucault and

others’ studies have demonstrated, a vector for the social propagation of bourgeois norms

of sexual, hygienic, and economic discipline in nineteenth-century France. Yet, on a

figurative level in L’Enfant, her socio-political situation is more comparable to that of her

child, or the working-class Fabre family for that matter, than it is to her husband’s.

Reinforcing this crucial ambivalence, Mme Vingtras is not only associated with the rural

working classes, but with the politically rebellious peasantry of Farreyrolles whose blood

runs in Jacques veins and who, during the Reinage festivals, joyously intermingle in

public dances and at cabarets before literally mixing “labour, [festival], et bataille” by

83
Luke Bouvier, op. cit., p. 170.
84
Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé, in Œuvres Complètes II, op. cit., p. 1827. Variant of the text cited in Luke
Bouvier, op. cit., p. 169.
 382

pelting gendarmes with rocks.85 From this early instance of identification with an

oppositional class collective to the final proclamation of socio-subjective engagement

with working-class politics and identities, that is, the “JE VEUX ETRE OUVRIER”

which sparks the final confrontation with the father in L’Enfant, one would have to make

a conscious effort to miss the fact that Jacques’s mother, perhaps unconsciously,

encourages this trajectory every step of the way, if only by dint of the fact that she so

consistently undermines the class values of the bourgeoisie through her very attempts to

deploy and exemplify them. Indeed, in this respect, there is a kind of discrepancy

between Mme Vingtras and bourgeois norms of sociability that only becomes more

pronounced as the text progresses. We could frankly cite dozens of such examples, but let

us just consider the following, intersecting symbolic problems: language and dress.

The auvergnat dialect, an instance of an interior (and, mineur) difference cleaving

the unity of the linguistic ipseity of French, emerges at two crucial moments in the text,

thus betraying the (very) recent peasant origins that Mme Vingtras tries to disavow as a

respectable member of the Nantes bourgeoisie. Incidentally, a similar order of

syntagmatic chaos is carried over into the realm of the clothes in which Mme Vingtras

dresses her child, making the child’s body the surface upon which the contradictions of

Mme Vingtras’s social position are mapped out, become legible. On this mediating space

of the child’s body, political identifications degenerate into a kind of vestimentary “word-

salad,” with the final result being that they lose altogether their ideological and semiotic

coherence: “Beaucoup de personnes me croient légitimiste. – J’ai une cravate (…)

comme en portaient les Incroyables (…); on crie au Bonapartisme cette fois. (…) Un

85
Jules Vallès, op. cit., pp. 93-4.
 383

dimanche on me voit (…) vêtu comme la meilleure des républiques.”86 Thus, not only

does the child’s body become the surface upon which the repressed political upheavals of

the nineteenth century make a symptomatic return (the catalyst for which is the mother’s

incapacity to read the signifiers she is inscribing on the surface of her progeny), but the

fabric (le tissu) of the child’s clothes also functions as a kind of comically fragmented

text, a sort of Histoire de la France depuis la Révolution. Jacques becomes a walking

synecdoche designating the radical instability of conservative political regimes in modern

France. Indeed, it is tempting to see in this symbolic/vestimentary chaos, a displaced and

deformed critique of the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of its own revolutionary ideals, its

grounding of the rights of man in the exclusion of women, children, and the poor from

the category of those who “have rights”. As such a critique lacks an acceptable forum for

articulation, Mme Vingtras unconsciously projects it onto the silent text(ure) of the

child’s wardrobe.

III. Tactical Irony and Le Livre-Écran

Le livre est là…

- Jules Vallès

In an early article that many scholars have posited as one of the key infratextual

sources for what would later become L’Enfant, Vallès writes,

[p]as une de nos émotions n’est franche (…); tout est copié, tout! (…) ‘Cherchez la
femme’ disait un juge. C’est le volume que je cherche, moi : le chapitre, la page, le
mot…C’est d’abord le livre d’enfance.87

Thus, for Vallès, what is at stake in discourse is not merely or simply the circulation of

unauthorized speech opposing a specific instance or target of authority; what is at stake is

86
Ibid., p. 253-4. Emphasis mine.
87
Jules Vallès, ”Les victimes du livre,” in Les Réfractaires (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), pp. 159-62.
 384

rather discourse itself as the raw, repetitive, differential material with which ideology

itself is constituted, reproduced, put into play. Discourse, or certain kinds of discourse

that posit themselves as imbued with a kind of unshakeable foundation of authority and

as natural repositories of value upon which (a certain) socio-political and symbolic order

rests (e.g., “c’est d’abord le livre d’enfance” that would edulcorate or victimize children),

is itself a crucial space where authority coagulates, where roles are fixed and meanings,

readings, and truth are stabilized. Discourse (or, as Vallès puts it, le Livre) manifests

itself through effects on readers’ social lives and relations. It attains, in other words, a

domain of interiority that can have potentially hypostasizing and alienating effects on the

sorts of ideas readers have about themselves and their relations to others, to the “Other”.

But this very interiority that makes le Livre dangerous in Vallès’s analysis is also

its paradoxical saving grace. In sum, though this interiority is the dimension in which

normalization takes place, it is also a priori a domain of free, un-policed circulation of

signifiers and signifieds, where a given meaning naturalizing positions and relations of

dominance and domination may be disseminated, but never fully governed; where their

play can never wholly be shut-down, and where their inner alterity, division, and

contingency slips through into expression. If the book is a screen in the sense of a divide,

it is also, crucially, a screen in the phantasmatic sense. Le Livre is a surface upon which

contradictions that seem insoluble in extra-literary life are given some modicum of

satisfactory symbolic resolution, or, at the very least, expression. Thus, in the same

article, it is no real contradiction when, several pages on, Vallès refers to certain kinds of

un-policeable readings as vehicles (or, literally, as “germs” in the botanical and

pathological sense) for generating new, subversive imaginary relations that can spill out
 385

over into the domain of the symbolic, creating a new subject position altogether: “Cela

n’est souvent qu’une fantaisie qui passe avec un rhume (…). Mais si le livre était ardent

(…), qu’on y prenne garde – Ne brutalisez pas cette impression d’enfant, ou malheur à

vous, malheur à lui! Il sortira de là un mauvais sujet ou un mauvais fils. // Le Livre tuera

le père.”88

Vallès’s posture towards textuality is thus doubly-articulated: on the one hand, le

Livre is, as Roger Bellet argued, “[un] écran entre l’homme et la vie, et l’homme et

l’homme”; on the other hand, Vallès’s singularity resides in the way he problematizes

received ideas concerning the nature and education of children. Indeed, we’d be quite

right to see in L’Enfant the dismantling of the nineteenth-century literary and cultural

ideologeme of the sentimental, romanticized vision of childhood as a golden age of

immaculate happiness and innocence. The emblematic discursive instance of this class-

bound sentimentalization of childhood can be found, along with any number of other

less-known publications and authors, in Victor Hugo when he wrote, in Les Misérables,

and à propos of Cosette no less, that “les enfants acceptent tout de suite et familièrement

la joie et le bonheur, étant eux-memes joie et Bonheur.”89

The Vallésian prescription for such a dilemma is summed up in the following mot

d’ordre (published in La Lettre de Junius, another important pre-text for his novel,

L’Enfant): “la sentimentalité nous tue”. Thus, his literary (re)construction of a childhood

is anything but happy, anything but a dithyrambic hymn to the douceurs du foyer; to the

contrary, it represents a dramatic attempt to destabilize the figure of the child, and indeed

the social configuration of the bourgeois family within one of the privileged symbolic

88
Ibid., pp. 167-8.
89
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Édition populaire (Lausanne: A. Larpin, 1863), p. 166.
 386

spaces where this configuration was constructed and diffused, namely, within literature.

As Vallès states in an article published in 1861, “cette petite guerre contre les homes avec

la langue amuse une heure. Mais après? Ce sont les choses et non les hommes qu’il faut

atteindre.” L’Enfant represents just such an attempt to “atteindre les choses”. It is, at its

most basic level, an attempt to throw a wrench into the imaginary works that allow

ideology to constitute itself, in this case by underlining the absurdity of sentimentalized

representations of children, childhood, and the childish that “transform the child into a

simple sign of innocence and joy, the personification of hope for the future, and source of

physical pleasure for adults, rather than a being in its own right.”90

More radically, however, this ideological critique of the nexus between idées

reçues and textuality is achieved by way of the subject’s relationship to books, to

textuality, to difference, and desire. The crucial encounter with the utopia of textuality,

with alternative narratives of history in L’Enfant, perpetually seems to occur in marginal

locations: Jacques finds a copy of Robinson Crusoe hidden in the crack of a wall, he

studies mathematics in the shack of an Italian exile, he reads the history of the French

Revolution in the Left Bank hovel of a struggling journalist. These texts have a

paradoxical marginality; they are located in spatial folds that create a difference

generating desire on the level of the child’s subjectivity. In the example of the history of

the French Revolution, this desire for difference triggered by the encounter with a new

narrative of history, which is also a political narrative of the present, retrospectively re-

arranges the narrative coordinates of Jacques Vingtras’s very sense of self-hood. In this

moment of political subjectivation, Jacques’s sense of who he is as a subject is

90
Rosemary Lloyd, The Land of Lost Content: Childhood in Nineteenth- Century French Literature
(Gloucestershire: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 80.
 387

repositioned on a genealogical continuum of revolt that denaturalizes past moments or

examples of structural violence such as poverty and hunger:

J’étais entré dans l’histoire de la Révolution (…). On venait d’ouvrir devant moi un livre
où il était question de la misère et de la faim, où je voyais passer des figures qui me
rappelaient mon oncle Joseph, ou l’oncle Chadenas (…). [I]ls [c.-à-d., le peuple] étaient
simples comme mes grands parents, et (…) ils avaient les mains couturées commes mes
oncles (…). [Ils] parlai[t] comme tout le monde, comme le père Fabre, comme la mère
Vincent, comme moi.91

Thus, through a contact with textuality, the status of which as both disciplinary

apparatus and potential operator of democratic disruption of subjugation is never wholly

resolved, Vallès opens his literary trilogy by pointing out the constitutive connections

between discourse and society (the school, the State, the book, the family), between

ideology and domination. The universe of his child is therefore anything but an innocent

paradise. It is, rather, ironic, chaotic, tongue-in-cheek, insubordinate, literary, and

political. In a moment of vertiginous, infratextual mise en abyme that figures in

L’Insurgé, Vingtras, referring to the Vallésian Enfant, states: “C’est bien le diable si,

avec ce bouquin là, je ne sème pas la révolte.”92 Vallès’s project as a writer is thus

always-already conceived along the lines of not only a literary politics, but a literary

revolt, or revolution.

Not surprisingly, this politico-literary project of undermining the imaginary raw

material of ideology extends in and through the second novel of the trilogy, Le Bachelier,

where the most frequent targets of Vallésian irony are romanticized depictions of urban

poverty, emblematized in the sugar-coated “bohémiennerie” of Pierre Béranger, a popular

bonapartist poet and song-writer in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, with

respect to the latter, Vallès’s literary critique reaches a kind of rhetorical climax of

91
Jules Vallès, L’Enfant, op. cit., p. 352.
92
Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé, op. cit., p. 69. Emphasis mine.
 388

indignation. For Vallès, the social is irremediably fractured into, at the very least, two

classes whose goals, aims, and desires are nominally and practically at antagonistic odds.

Thus, when literature serves as a symbolic “plâtre” covering up this socio-economic and

ideological fissure, alienating the poor from each other and furnishing a symbolic space

in which the bourgeoisie may virtually reconcile itself to, or indeed ignore its exploitation

of the poor and working classes, the syntactical and punctual rhythm of the text becomes

more urgent, more militantly imperative in the service of what we might call an

ideological demystification. Citing a popular refrain by Béranger, Vallès refutes each

homogeneously sentimental proposition on poverty with a violently intrusive realism in

which the contradictions of the proletariat are put into stark relief. Critically, the position

of descriptive authority grammatically embodied by Béranger’s use of the third-person,

which, as Barthes and Benveniste remind us, is a kind of infantile non-person whose

speech can only ever be reported, undergoes a decisive transition to the anonymity, but

perhaps also the equality of, the neutral pronoun “on”:93

‘Les gueux sont des gens heureux, qui s’aiment entre eux’ – mais on se cogne et l’on
s’assassine entre affamés! / ‘Les gueux sont des gens heureux !’ Mais il ne faut pas dire
cela aux gueux ! s’ils le croient, ils ne se révolteront pas, ils prendront le bâton, la besace,
et non le fusil !94

Such a logic of counter-discursivity runs through, and links together, each text in

the Trilogie Vingtras. For each (romanticized, sentimental, etc.) representation that would

seek to esthetically and politically justify a localized situation of economic domination or

exploitation, or physical violence, which is directed against the child (the infans), in

L’Enfant, and the working-classes demos of Paris in L’Insurgé, Vallès seeks a counter-

93
Roland Barthes, “Ecrire, verbe transitif,” in Le Bruissement de la langue: essais critiques IV (Paris:
Seuil, 1984); Emile Benveniste, “La subjectivité dans la langue,” in Problèmes de linguistique génerale
(Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
94
Jules Vallès, Le Bachelier, op. cit., p. 113.
 389

model that acerbically points towards the systematic internal contradictions that such

models depend upon in order to function. One such example, Vallès affirms, resides in

depictions of (urban) poverty as a care-free, enviable form of freedom from the same

economic concerns of the bourgeoisie which in real terms through the nineteenth century

inevitably tended to consolidate, if not aggravate, the poverty of the urban and rural poor.

Nevertheless, we would indeed be justified to wonder whether or not this

Vallésian project is successful, or whether it simply stumbles on a nefarious pitfall of

counter-discursivity which inevitably leads most oppositional forms of expression to

reconfirm the legitimacy of the authority they set out to contest, transgress, or

problematize. In writing a narrative of childhood, poverty, and political agency against

the grain of sentimentalism, does Vallès not run the risk of falling into the literary

pendant of sentimentalism we call misérabilisme? Does the textual “authority” that

Vallès chases out the front door sneak back in through the window? The question merits

an answer to the extent that inscribing childhood within a discourse of passive

victimhood risks reifying the infans/demos every bit as much as sentimentalizing

depictions do; it risks transforming this ambivalent figure into a simple mirror in which

the self-sufficient humanism of the one doing the writing may be satisfactorily reflected.

As Barbara Edmonds argues:

Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and continuing throughout the nineteenth century
there was increased interest in the child. The trend was manifested in nearly all the
French Romantic poets, especially Victor Hugo. In 1863 Hugo published Les Misérables
in which he depicted the child as the helpless victim of a social scheme which he
adjudged wrong.95

95
Barbara Edmonds, “In Search of Jules Vallès,” The French Review 40:5 (April, 1967), p. 638.
 390

Within the parameters, then, of miserabilist discourse, things are hardly any

better; though there is indubitably a revolutionary aspect of romanticism that is

indissociable from social critique, it too constructs an image of the infans as hapless and

helpless victim, a pure instance of pathos soliciting an emotional investment on the part

of the reader. The example of Cosette, dependent upon the benevolent intervention of a

now staunchly bourgeois and capitalist Jean Valjean, from Les Misérables leaps to mind

in this respect.96 At the most, the child, for example, becomes the object of a moralizing

humanism destined to stimulate a kind of affective, virtual philanthropy that does little in

the way of interrogating the legitimacy of how disciplinary power infantilizes the victims

of poverty, and impoverishes representations of childhood.

Vallès, however, appears to be aware of the potential contradictions of his literary

enterprise, and it is with an eye toward preventing the reader from making any facile

interpretations of his subject that he strategically destabilizes the figure of the child on

semiotic and enunciative levels through a heavy dependence on a rhetoric of irony and

the dis-figurative tropes of devenir-autres. Much has been said on the Vallésian use of

irony as a form of resistance,97 yet it bears pointing out again that Vallésian irony

functions both as a kind of textual complicity, and as a discursive self-destruct

mechanism, recalling, as Paul de Man affirmed, that at the heart of irony resides a threat
96
Cosette is not merely what we might call unsophisticatedly an “unbelievable” victim of child abuse and
exploitation. In a sense, she is “unbelievable” in the exact sense that a character such as Jean
Valjean/Monsieur Madeleine is unbelievable qua capitalist from the perspective of the history of the
development of capitalism in nineteenth century (provincial) France precisely because he accumulates
wealth without transforming it into capital and without exploiting surplus value from his workers. The
village of Montreuil-sur-mer, in which Valjean/Madeleine re-invests the entirety of his profit, is thus a kind
of Saint-Simonian dream, a point which is no doubt all the more unintentionally ironic given the author’s
acerbic criticism of France’s most well-known Saint-Simonian in 1862, namely, Napoléon III. In sum, the
world of Victor Hugo’s misérables is one in which social conflict has been displaced into the domain of
morality, sentiment, and nature. See Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, op. cit., pp. 226-35.
97
See, inter alia., Luke Bouvier, op. cit.; Luke Bouvier, “Shameless Irony: Jules Vallès and the Politics of
Childhood,” Esprit Créateur 39:4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 39-53; and Marina van Zuylen’s “Pour une
esthétique du comique: L’Enfant de Jules Vallès,” Études françaises 32:3 (1993), pp. 144-61.
 391

to “the possibility of understanding” stemming from what he calls a text’s “readability,”

or the possibility of polysemia, of difference within the signifier that metonymically

fragments the signified into a multiplicity of possible readings.98

In Vallès’s novels, irony functions as a strategic critique arrived at through the

dialogical process of interrogating (eironas) of a discourse whose inner tensions are

brought to the foreground through the mere act of their citation. In Kierkegaardian terms,

Vallès’s irony negates sentimental depictions of the bourgeois family, or disparaging

ones of the working-classes precisely by making the wager that if these normative

statements are reproduced in a different, ironic context, their absolute lack of “validity”

will be plain for the careful reader to see.

Indeed, Vallésian irony is at base a form of intertextuality, of iterability, doubled

up on an enunciative level by an act of commentary that is more often than not implicit,

that needs to be disengaged, reformulated, and interrogated in turn by the reader. Such

commentary, which is actively decoded by the reader, tends to aim at bringing out into

expression the raw, absurd contingency at the foundation of any “parole d’autorité”.

Furthermore, if the primary tactic of irony is citationality, its secondary goal is to

ceaselessly defuse the reader’s temptation to immobilize the child as the pathetic victim

of social evils that remain unidentified.

98
Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 167. Given that Kierkegaard is such a crucial intertextual point in de Man’s
discussion of irony, we find much the same sort of threat to the epistemological, political and symbolic
legitimacy of the “world” (or, in his terms, “actuality”) in Kierkegaard’s study of irony. Indeed,
Kierkegaard describes the “ironic subject” in terms that can only too appropriately be applied to Vallès:
“[the ironic subject] is negatively free (…), [b]ut this very freedom, this suspension [i.e., the fact that irony
suspends the validity of the “actual,” the “given,” what hegemonically appears under the guise of the
“natural”], gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes so intoxicated (…), in the infinity of
possibilities (…); he destroys the given actuality by the actuality itself.” Søren Kierkegaard, “The Concept
of Irony,” The Essential Kierkegaard, Howard and Edna Hong, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000), pp. 28-9. See also, Vladimir Jankélévitch, op. cit.
 392

Crucially, then, instances of authority justifying the mundane world of everyday

violence deployed by the strong against the weak are revealed to be based not in the

natural (or even transcendental) world, but in the arbitrary universe of the linguistic sign.

Vallès thus suggests that the “origin” of authority is to be sought in the non-origin of

convention, difference, and repetition; it is constructed, in other words, on the shaky

ground of textuality, in books, be it the Decalogue, or the “Code”: “On me fait apprendre

à lire dans un livre où il y a écrit (…) qu’il faut obéir à ses père et mère: ma mère a bien

fait de me battre.” 99

The ironic interrogation opens up a yawning cleft between the content of the

enunciated (a child is beaten, the justification of which can be found in an anonymous

book founding a principle of hierarchical differences and subordinations) and that of the

code itself. Thus, the commentary in the coda contains a stinging rebuke that captures the

power of discourse by simply repeating, in an ironic mode, the implicit propositions

grounding and naturalizing authority, namely, that obedience can only be guaranteed in

final analysis by a recourse violence, which in turn can only be justified by the imposition

of a hierarchical series of discursive and ontological differences to be policed and

managed, if needs be by recourse to violence. It is precisely the stupefying circularity, the

idiocy (in the etymological sense) of authority that Vallès brilliantly underscores in the

above-passage through the gestures of reiteration and citation. For another way of

understanding “ma mère a bien fait…” is less as an impossible utterance than as an

instance of free indirect discourse. In this respect, Vallès’s texts are particularly

pedagogical, illustrating the fundamental function of irony as the non-coincidence of the

signifier and the signified, as a kind of excess, or doubling-up, of narration and

99
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 38. See also, Guillemette Tison, op. cit., p. 84.
 393

enunciation on a structural level. Irony is a kind of language within language itself, a

speech within infantia, which means and thinks much more than it explicitly says. To

properly read the Vallésian text, it is impossible to read at the level of the diegetical

surface, for “meaning” is absent there. As Marina van Zuylen remarked, echoing

Jankélévitch, reading Vallès in an ironic mode requires a plunging into a kind of active

cooperation with the text.100 It requires the reader to take a kind of pleasure in the text, in

the process of making meanings in-common, of arming oneself within the time and space

of the text with the common linguistic device of irony. The Trilogie Vingtras is thus in a

certain etymologically oriented sense, a form of literary communism (comunire) in which

the reader constructs and actualizes implicit strata of meaning, becoming therefore the

co-author in her/his own right of the writing-subject’s literary and political critique.

IV. The Other-Child

Along with an oppositional mode of writing that relies upon ironic re-inscription

to displace authoritative discourses, institutions, or practices, Vallès deploys a second,

important trope in his literary representation of childhood, of the child, and of the infans:

namely, he deploys a technique we are calling the devenir-autre. The devenir-autre is a

textual strategy of dis-figuration that renders the infans/demos different to itself, and

100
“Ce plaisir [de l’ironie] est compliqué; il dépend de la coopération du lecteur.” Marina van Zuylen, art.
cit., p. 152. Though for Jankélévitch the trope of irony and the activity of reading fall into the category of
“aristocratic” forms and activities, he too, somewhat surprisingly, concedes that there can be no ironic
intelligibility (and, by extension, no possibility of meaning as such) without the fundamental precondition
of commonality, cooperation, and reciprocity between the ironist and his/her interlocutor. Crucially, what is
at stake in this collaborative activity of meaning-making, is the democratic undoing of hierarchical
divisions in what we might call, following Rancière, the equality of intelligences: “l’ironiste et l’ironisé
coopèrent de compagnie à une oeuvre commune (…); après le rapport despotique ou irréciproque
d’inférieur à supérieur qui implique hiérarchie (…) et subordination, voici la fraternisation symposiaque
(…): Alcibiade, fortement émoustillé, Socrate toujours sobre (…) communient dans l’égalité.” Vladimir
Jankélévitch, op. cit., pp. 65-6. My emphasis.
 394

transforms it into an object of interpretation for the reader. In her study of L’Enfant,

Marina van Zuylen has also picked up on this curious semiotic phenomenon of

metaphorical estrangement, which she argues forms a kind of stylistic principle of

Vallès’s textuality. In terms of its genealogy, it is not entirely improbable that this

stylistic trait stems from the journalistic milieu in which Vallès spent most of his adult

life working prior to his time in exile,101 specifically, the milieu of oppositional, satirical

journals for which Vallès frequently worked (such as La Lune and L’Éclipse). One of the

principal semiotic techniques of nineteenth-century caricature consisted in pushing the

imagistic syntagma to amusing levels of figural abstraction in order to, on the one hand

escape the attentive scissors of the censor, and, on the other, to reduce the ideological gap

between the journal and its readership by soliciting an actively collaborative readerly

audience willing and capable of decrypting the politically-charged caricatural image.102

Furthermore, deformations of human forms embodying socially dominant positions and

antagonisms, frequently fused the human with the kingdoms of flora and fauna to render

a target grotesque, improbable, unintimidating. Such deformations are well-documented

staples of modern political caricature in France. From time of the French revolution to

Honoré Daumier, Faustin, and Alfred Le Petit in Vallès’s day, this strategy of

disfiguration formed one of the most reliably intelligible tricks in the satirical bag of

caricature in nineteenth-century French journalism.

101
Cf., Silvia Disegni, Jules Vallès: du journalisme au roman autobiographique (Paris: L’Harmattan,
1996) ; Roger Bellet, Jules Vallès, op. cit., pp. 193-274.
102
Cf., Robert J. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1989); Betrand Tillier, À la Charge: la caricature en France de 1789 à 2000 (Paris:
Éditions de l’Amateur, 2005).
 395

For van Zuylen, “l’univers Vallésien est animé d’objets qui relativisent et

déforment l’humain”.103 She cites as a key, burlesque example of this relativized human

form in L’Enfant Jacques’s aunt Agnès who, over the course of an intensely delirious

description that could figure as a hallmark of anti-Balzacian realism, ends up resembling

a human-vegetable hybrid with no discernible identity at all. Perhaps most intriguing,

however, is not so much the manner by which objects deform, un-form, or other the

contours of human form in L’Enfant, but rather the consistency with which the child

submits his own form to these symbolic inscriptions of radical alterity.104

The devenir-autre, however, does not emerge willy-nilly in the text. Rather, this

tactic surfaces at key moments in the text where Jacques is submitted to some form of

particularly unbearable form of physical or emotional abuse. Its function is therefore not

simply to skewer the grounds upon which the child is to be apprehended by the reader as

a figure of innocence without agency. More crucially, the devenir-autre provides the

child with a kind of échappatoire, a fault-line through which he slips and manages to, if

not master his position in a relationship of dominance, then to at least articulate some

form of resistance to authority, including the fundamental authority of a stable identity. In

other words, if what we’re dealing with is a defense formation, it is a highly effective one

which allows Jacques to escape the “traumatism” of childhood by symbolically

displacing the site of violence from his textual body on to an inanimate object or a

103
Marina van Zuylen, art. cit., p. 145.
104
As such, this distortion of the self’s symbolic intelligibility could be seen as corresponding to what
Jankélévitch calls the “economy” of self-ironization. Redfern, for his part, sees Vallès’s capacity to take
himself as the butt of a joke as one of the keys to unlocking the intersections of humor and politics (in his
opinion, “blagues are often the only resource the have-nots have.”). See Vladimir Jankélévitch, op. cit., pp.
26-30; and Walter Redfern, French Laughter, op. cit., pp. 114-15.
 396

baroque human-animal hybrid more reminiscent of Ambroise Paré than of Gavroche.105

When Mme Vingtras refuses, for example, Jacques the small pleasure of playing on a

swing, thus depriving the child of a source of corporeal pleasure, he transforms his body

into a “saladier cassé”.

Clothing, as we have suggested above, is always a highly volatile element of the

Vallésian text. The importance of clothing for Vallès may constitute a parodic

reinscription of Balzac’s endless preoccupation with the intersections of clothing as

social signifiers capable of disturbing the relationship between being and appearances.

Indeed, one of the more interesting cases of intertextual dialogue and displacement of the

Balzacian text occurs in Le Bachelier, when, after making a small sum as a tutor in Paris,

Jacques acquires enough capital to re-invest in that all-important social sign system of

clothing. Vallès, however, takes to its absurd limit the Balzacian theme of the wild

fluctuation of a character’s social-value, which is always tied to the unstable currency of

the clothes one wears. Vallès metaphorically transforms the material of clothing, of

textiles (and textuality) into a series of literal signs of value, or bank-notes: “Que c’est

souple sous la main! Il me semble que je caresse des billets de banque.”

Vallès of course undermines the pretensions of the realist text to faithfully

reproduce society through mimetic portrayal by insisting on the unstable, contradictory

nature of the social sign system itself (i.e., one can really be as brilliant as Lucien de

Rubempré, and a social non-entity if one’s clothing is not in fashion, or stained with mud,

etc.). However, he takes this subversion a characteristic step further by unexpectedly

inserting these possessions into a deflationary semiotic economy, tying them to a “real”

105
As Rosemary Lloyd suggests, Gavroche is a figure that Hugo cannot quite manage to ontologically pin
down. Rosemary Lloyd, op. cit., pp. 80-5.
 397

economy that is pure performance, theatricality, play, comedy: “Je vaux moins pourtant

depuis que j’ai ces habits-là! (…) Je vaux moins. J’ai (…) jou[é] la comédie pour avoir

mes vêtements (…).”106

In L’Enfant, as we have already seen, this sign-system not only springs to life, it

does so based on a series of antithetical (i.e., les incroyables and la meilleure des

républiques) juxtapositions that come closest to resembling, if they were to be endowed

with a vestimentary syntax, the figure of perissology. Jacques’ clothing has an excessive

verbosity that transforms hats into a “menace,” and trousers into a form of torture that

“écorche” and “ensanglante” the child’s body – a body which, in order to effectuate some

small measure of resistance, the narrator converts into an unrecognizable midget, or a

“poêle”.107

At base, then, the textual tactic of the devenir-autre has a destabilizing effect on

the kinds of interpretations of the childish figure the text puts at the reader’s disposition.

Anticipating a tradition of misérabiliste readings, the Vallésian text and child is simply

too “déstabilisant pour être plaint”.108 In the same way that the deployment of irony and

parody ruptures the referential bond between linguistic code and semantic content, the

devenir-autre, which should perhaps ultimately be conceived as a mode of writing, as a

devenir-auteur, shatters the minimal ontological unity of the subject by submitting it to a

series of transgressions, or movements from one species to another, from subject to

object, from self to other. Ultimately, the text suggests, if the child has a “nature,” it is an

anti-essentialist, fluid nature that defies descriptive exhaustion, and that can only be

approximately approached through the figures of metaphor and metonymy, through a

106
Jules Vallès, Le Bachelier, op. cit., pp. 606-611.
107
Jules Vallès, L’Enfant, op. cit., pp. 69, 71-3.
108
Marina van Zuylen, art. cit., p. 147.
 398

displacement of the signifier. No barrier, in final analysis, reveals itself to be without

pores, fissures, and fault-lines. Temporal and ontological frontiers either collapse into one

another, or are pushed out to the very limits of iterability, suggesting that the child,

l’infans, may be less substance than a process of semiotic jouissance produced within the

gaps, repetitions and basic sounds of language itself. Note, for example, the playful

rhyme, the syntagmatic anaphora, and the polyptoton around the verb “avoir” in the

following passage: “Tout à l’heure j’avais l’air d’un léopard, j’ai l’air d’un vieillard

maintenant. Il y a quelque chose là-dessous.”109

Enfant-léopard, enfant-casserole, enfant-poêle, enfant-vieillard, enfant-nain. It’s

not surprising that Jacques Vingtras affirms, ‘je suis un mauvais sujet, après tout.’110

Indeed, as readers, we are hard-pressed to find a (unified, coherent) subject in L’Enfant.

Rather, we are confronted with a series of figural transgressions that challenge the child’s

ontological, social, and political legibility. One cannot insert Jacques Vingtras’s child,

bachelor, or indeed working-class insurgent, into a sentimentalized or reductively

miserabilist interpretative grill for the simple reason that these subject positions are in

constant flux. To paraphrase van Zuylen, we don’t take pity on pots and pans.111 Thus,

the devenir-autre is a tactical mode of writing that works in tandem with irony to short-

circuit our tendency to invest the child with stable ideological signification, to invest also

in the figure of the child on a strictly emotional plane. Furthermore, the devenir-autre

insists on the child’s creative capacity for resistance, his capacity to escape the attention

of school teachers, his family, disciplinary techniques of correction, drawing thus the

reader’s attention to the relationship between the child and these institutions of authority.

109
Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 76.
110
Ibid.
111
Marina van Zuylen, art. cit., p. 148.
 399

Even if the Vallésian child is “beaucoup fouetté,” then, something of its subjectivity,

something of that inner core which disciplinary power aims at reaching, correcting, and

classifying remains intact, and obstinately and humorously persists in drawing the

“wrong” lesson from his punishment, humiliation, and abuse at the hands of the stronger.

In disfiguring the infans/demos Vallès not only hits upon a complex form of subjectivity

for this figure, he closely aligns this dynamic subjectivity with other figures who are

similarly infantilized, such as his mother and the working-class Fabre family, for

example. It is also, finally, in key moments of devenir-autre that an ethical sense of the

just and the unjust, of right and wrong that even a child is capable of apprehending is

articulated in the text.

Before concluding, let us consider one last instance of the devenir-autre, one

which we might call the devenir-chien. This final, curious motif allows us to grasp that

the infra-textual relationship connecting L’Enfant to L’Insurgé is not simply

chronological, but, rather, thematic and dialectical.

At first glance, it is tempting to see in this (dis)figure one of many mechanisms of

resistance along the axis of devenir-autres that runs through L’Enfant. Indeed, in a certain

sense, the devenir-animal largely functions as a kind of rip in the fabric of the text, a hole

through which the child escapes before the reader can pin it down in a hermeneutic

category. But the devenir-animal is not just an échappatoire.112 This gap in the text is not

merely negative. Rather, it constitutes a productive form of negativity providing the

occasion for the text to condense and silently reject each institution of discipline seeking

112
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 232-309.
 400

tutelage over the body of the child. The devenir-animal becomes, in other words, the very

condition of emancipation of the child’s body and identity:

‘Tu ne dis rien,’ me fait le petit de l’Ecole Normale, ‘à quoi penses-tu ?’ […] Je ne pense
ni à ma mère, ni au bon dieu, ni à ma classe ; et voilà que je me mets à bondir ! Je me fais
l’effet d’un animal dans un champ, qui aurait cassé sa corde ; et je grogne et je caracole
comme un cabri, au grand étonnement de mon petit camarade qui […] s’attend à me voir
brouter. J’en ai presque envie.113

This devenir-animal will hit a kind of rhetorical apex when it comes directly into

contact with the theme of the free movement of the child’s body several chapters later. Of

course, perhaps as a kind of ironic, meta-discursive wink, this is also the sole passage

where Vallès evokes the “nature” of the child, which is thus both “gai,” but also

metonymically akin to that of a dog: “gai de nature (…); quand je peux échapper aux

pensums, éviter la sequester, je sauté comme un gros chien.”114 Time does not permit us

to discuss in greater detail the systematic subversion of properly normative disciplinary

technologies of power, such as the pensums115 in L’Enfant, but it’s worth noting that they

are typically resisted through a kind of excremental process of staining and of automatic

writing that translates an inner resistance to domination. The pensum qua normalizing

punishment is always undone on its very own terms, in the irreflexive repetition of a

normative proscription.116

113
Jules Vallès, op. cit., pp. 70-1.
114
Ibid., p. 185.
115
See Foucault’s discussion of the pensum qua normative technology in the apparatus of disciplinary
power in Surveiller et punir, op. cit., pp., 210-11. For Foucault, disciplinary power is not only corrective
and normative, it normalizes through repetition.
116
Jules Vallès, op. cit., pp. 182, 204, : ‘ [J]e barbouille [le papier] avec ce qui me reste d’encre, je pense à
tout autre chose que ce que j’écris – et il se trouve qu’il y a quelquefois dans mes pensums des ‘Turfin
pignouf. Turfin crétin’ (…). J’arrivai à la retenue en retard (…). Je bâclai mon pensum, bus un peu d’encre,
et six heures arrivèrent.’ Note too, how the relationship to a disciplinary organization is destablized by the
late arrival, and how the very material of normalization in this case is rendered strange to itself, becoming
an object of consumption. Thus, the arkhos, the “title,” “commandment/rule,” “beginning,” is submitted to
a kind of cyclical logical of consumption-excretion that devastates its “commandment” by juxtaposing its
legitimacy with that which is rejected, or ejected, from the body, the akorpos.
 401

Thus we find ourselves confronted with two layers of semiotic transgression, two

modes of scrambling the cultural codes which make relations of domination formally

intelligible. As elsewhere, Vallés’s child passes from one species to an other, but the

“dog,” taken here as a signifier of domestication, obedience, the successful application of

disciplinary power, is submitted to a re-coding. For the child, it becomes a signifier of

emancipation, disobedience; the dog becomes a symbol of the “un-leashed” jouissance of

taking pleasure in bodily gestures that take leave of the productive economy of discipline

(bondir, caracoler, brouter). Crucially, the devenir-chien recurs in L’Insurgé, where it is

explicitly linked to critical modes of writing, where the literary and the political

converge. Indeed, the devenir-chien emerges in the last book of the trilogy at the very

moment Vingtras engages himself as a écrivain-chien in a revolutionary struggle against

the authoritarian Empire, one whose principal arm is language itself: ‘Il s’est rappelé mes

crocs (…). [O]n va vous déchainer, bouledogue, et qu’on vous entende aboyer.”117

V. Perspectives

I would like to conclude on a note that re-problematizes the series of linguistic,

semiotic, and political disruptions that we have argued are lodged at the very heart of the

Vallés’s novels. What, indeed, do the strategies of irony and devenir-autre accomplish in

these texts? Do they function simply as more or less conscious flights away from, or

beyond discipline, or do they rather constitute a more deliberate narrative choice on the

part of the author to create, within the confines of the novel, an anti-authoritative

discursive space? On the one hand, it is indeed possible, and perhaps all too easy, to

locate in the narrator’s recourse to puns, jokes, and irony a kind of apotropaic reaction to
117
Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé, op. cit., p. 96.
 402

disturbing thoughts, wishes, or memories.118 As Freud postulated, humor exists within the

unconscious domain of defense mechanisms, wherein the super-ego attempts to protect,

“tel un adulte à l’égard d’un enfant,” the ego from potentially traumatic or anxiogenic

phenomena existing in the extra-psychic world, or indeed as a form of compensation for

bending to the injunctions of the reality principle.119 A Freudian approach to the question

of humor, in any event, does not invalidate the hypothesis of an indisciplinary mode of

writing that temporarily manages to render inoperative the mechanisms of disciplinary

power. Indeed, Freud invites us to consider humor in a double-perspective: on the one

hand, humor is a kind of psychic strategy “déployée pour échapper à la contrainte de la

souffrance”; on the other hand, humor also needs to be conceived of as a defiant posture

towards whatever positions itself as a threat to the self, as a posture that relegates this

threat, and indeed the world with it, to the status of a “jeu d’enfant”. As Freud writes,

“l’humour n’est pas résigné, il défie; il ne signifie pas seulement le triomphe du moi,

mais aussi du principe du plaisir.”120 In a Freudian light, the richly textured irony and

puns that run through the trilogy can be interpreted as the conscious manipulation of

semiotic codes such as language, behavior, and clothing, which can all the same be

motivated by unconscious psychic forces and formations. Perhaps we ought, finally, to

understand the irony and disfigurative devenir-autres of the Vingtras trilogy as the

expression of a revolt against what perhaps appears most unassailable in what we might

call the “social reality principle,” that is, the natural order of things in which the weak are

118
On the use of puns in Vallès’s oeuvre, see Walter Redfern, French Laughter, op. cit.
119
Sigmund Freud, “L’Humour,” in L’Inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais (Paris : Gallimard, 1985),
p. 325. To return to Jankélévitch one last time, it would appear that this essay by Freud forms an important,
if unacknowledged, intertext that informs his conceptual elaboration and commentary upon the master
trope of irony. For Jankélévitch, irony is one mode of using language to turn danger, anxiety, the brutality
of history, and the tragic finitude of existence into a kind of game. Vladimir Jankélévitch, op. cit., pp. 9, 21,
27, 30, 46.
120
Sigmund Freud, op. cit., pp. 325-328. My emphasis.
 403

abused, powerless. Revolt, if not revolution, takes place in Vallès’s acts of writing, as a

prise de parole silencieuse that defies and suspends within its pages the disciplinary

authority of the family, the school, the state, and perhaps of literature itself.

Indeed, as the trilogy progresses, the degree to which the target of Vallésian irony

is in fact textual, is writing itself. Writing taken as an ideological relay for an unjust

partage du sensible becomes the target of not only Vallésian irony, but also anger and

explicit critique in L’Insurgé, where Vingtras condemns the sentimental misérabilisme of

Henri Murger as so many lilacs on the path leading to prison or the grave.121 To these

reductive and mystifying literary representations, Vallès opposes a counter-discourse that

aims at providing a representative je/nous to those whose position in society is that of

structural exclusion/silence, or that of the il/ils. Perhaps Vallès’s most scandalous

innovation is to have been amongst the first to destabilize the socio-literary conventions

of representation in the novel, to have, within literature itself, created a “je” for subjects

who are, normally, infantilized on the level of representation. At base, Vallès’s literary

and political project resides in letting the ironic, angry, political language of a series of

subjects, such as children, women, and the working-classes, slip in to literature as a

legitimate, and complex, esthetic expression capable of forming a narrative “voice”.

It is questionable, we have argued, to separate L’Enfant from the Bachelier, and a

fortiori from L’Insurgé, for to do so would be tantamount to missing the fundamental

metonymical link between the child and the revolutionary, between the infans and the

demos. By way of illustrating the dialectical relation between the books of the trilogy, it

is worth recalling that Vallès’s Enfant is quite literally “born” in the middle of the last

book of the series, a birth that thus chips away at the temporal and textual frontiers
121
Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé, op. cit., p. 91.
 404

separating the beginning from the end, birth from death, and child from insurgent

member of the Paris Commune. Vallès, in one final tour-de-force instance of devenir-

autre, can feel his book trembling in him like a little literary fetus kicking to stretch its

legs in the womb. He thus maternalizes the masculine in a way that is crucially not

culturally pejorative, but is rather valorized as an act of creative indignation, hope, and

collective struggle that links the incipit of the trilogy to the excipit in a proleptic

circularity that is, properly speaking, revolutionary (even if does represent, in the light of

a deconstructive femininst approach, a slightly ambivalent phallogocentric

reappropriation of the feminine power of genesis): “j’ai senti dans mes entrailles un

tressaillement de colère (…); c’était mon livre, fils de ma souffrance qui avait donné

signe de vie devant le cerceuil du bohème.”122

In the emergence of the marginalized and infantilized into literary speech, we find

the very ethos of the Paris Commune itself. For, as Kristin Ross suggests, the Commune

did not merely represent a moment or episode of political struggle in late nineteenth-

century France. More fundamentally, for Vallès and his readers, for those, in other words,

who may remain haunted by the specter of the Commune, it rather represented a more

radical rupture within the very fabric of consensus, a breach in the otherwise seamless

façade of the partage du sensible in which normative spaces, roles, and speech were

reconfigured; it represented an utopic parenthesis, during which workers and artists,

artisans and politicians, men and women traded roles in a kind of open revolt against the

platonic dogma that requires each person and thing to occupy its place in the organic

totality of the social. As Ross points out, during the Commune, “Courbet [who became

president of the Fédération des artistes de la Commune] and Napoléon Gaillard [a

122
Ibid., p. 69.
 405

shoemaker who constructed architecturally masterful barricades, notably on the present

day Place de la Concorde], are not in their [rightful] places, […and this] provokes a

deeper anxiety: that of a (…) radical questioning of identity”.123

The Vingtras trilogy needs to be understood along the lines of this identitary,

political, and esthetic displacement. Like the event that led to his exile and thus,

indirectly, provided the seminal material for the birth of a truly irregular, highly contested

literary career and legacy,124 Vallès too allows the infans/demos, those figures who are

normally reduced within the space of the novel to the semiologico-ideological function of

legitimizing the given order of things, to play, lie, imitate, speak and write in the

foreground of the literary text. The Vallésian enfant-peuple’s voice is articulated in a

deeply ironic, deeply (dis)figurative idiom which we might call minor, but must

definitely posit as indisciplinary and utopic, mingling as it does the oral with the highly

literary, the childish with the revolutionary, the infans with the demos in the egalitarian

space of the novel.

123
Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 12-14.
124
Bouvier recounts that as recently as 1989, the proposal to name a school in the Var after Jules Vallès
provoked such a huge outcry from the (largely staunchly conservative) city council that the plan was
scrapped and the school named after…Marcel Pagnol. Cf., Luke Bouvier, op. cit., p. 9, n. 2
 406

Epilogue: The Return of the Commune

I. How (Not) to Write about an Event, or: The “Problem” with the Commune

It is of course something of a cliché of critical historiography to point out that

there is no linguistically determined lexical distinction in French between “histoire” taken

as the construction of a (fictional) narrative, i.e., a story, and “Histoire” as discipline of

the “Human Sciences” (History, Geschichte, etc.) dealing with the triumphs and

catastrophes of human communities and events.1 The latter is conceived of, and indeed

culturally privileged, as a kind of “story” on the side of referentiality (i.e., science) that

constitutes and positions subjects, inserts them into a series of imaginary communities,

power relations, and grand narratives. The former, histoire, is, inversely, on the unreliable

side of appearance, fiction, the arbitrary play of metaphor and metonymy, irony, and

esthetics. My aim in eliciting this well-known, internal mark of irresolvable tension,

inscribed on the surface of the signifier histoire in French, goes beyond the deployment

of a rhetorical device apt to solicit the reader’s assent. Rather, in these final pages, where

we shall examine the return of the historical event known as the Paris Commune within

the space of fictional, and indeed para-literary, narratives, my aim is to trouble this divide

between history and narrative. In this final chapter, we shall insist on the politically

disruptive potential, or “literarity,”2 of historical narratives as they intersect with fictional

1
See, inter alia, Keith Jenkins’s Re-Thinking History (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), and
Hayden White’s illuminating foreward to the English translation of Jacques Rancière’s Les Noms de
l’histoire: Hayden White, “Rancière’s Revisionism,” in The Names of History: On the Poetics of
Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. vii-xix.
2
The term is borrowed, of course, from Jacques Rancière’s critical lexicon. Prior to Rancière, the concept
of literarity was deployed by the Russian Formalists, and particularly by Roman Jakobson in his
structuralist poetics. I reserve here the sense of the capacity of a story being told to change the situation in
 407

narratives such as film and the graphic novel. The stakes in this final chapter are to

determine in what sense the esthetic and ideological struggles with which artists such as

Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Vallès engaged some one hundred and forty years ago remain

pertinent for the critical and epistemological grammar that we have at our disposal for

thinking about (and desiring) community and story-telling today.

Let us pose, therefore, a simple question: given the inevitable intersection

between narrative and history (of science and fiction, of memory and forgetting) what

does it mean to “tell a story”? How does the relevance of some stories emerge as easily

recognizable, as officially important moments worthy of recollection and preservation in

the fabric of a Nation’s “History,” whereas others appear consigned by both ideological

and material forces beyond their control to the realm of counter-narrative/memory, if not

to a certain form of indifferent oblivion? What happens to an historical event when its

meaning, rather than its referentiality, becomes the object of an esthetic as well as

semantic contention? What transformation takes place when how something is related is

just as important as whether something is recounted at all; when “let us remember”

implies its opposite, “let us also forget”? What do we do when we are dealing with a

“story” that has persistently seemed to defy its own telling, a “story” that has insisted on

overwhelming the discursive and temporal barriers of “History,” on entangling the events

and struggles of the past with those of the present in a manner which, rather than

which it is received, or, as Ross Chambers eloquently puts it in terms that anticipated Rancière’s theses on
the convergences of democracy and literature, “stories are not innocent (…); storytelling not only derives
significance from situation but also has the power to change human situations.” Ross Chambers, Story and
Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), p. 7. Rancière deploys the concept of literarité in the following terms: ”le dérèglement propre à
l’écriture est de brouiller cette hiérarchie [établie depuis Platon entre les manières de faire et les manières
d’être] (…). [La littérarité] est aussi ce mouvement par lequel ces mots en disponibilité saisissent et
détournent de la voie tracée des êtres dont ce n’était pas l’affaire que de s’occuper du logos et de la
communauté.” Jacques Rancière, La Chair des mots: politiques de l’écriture (Paris: Galilée, 1998), pp.
126-7.
 408

stabilizing the stories we tell each other about who we are in the present, seems to upset

these hegemonic narrative traditions?

Of course, it’s rare indeed, if not strictly unimaginable, to see historians arrive at a

monolithically homogenous account that poses irrefutable guidelines for interpreting and

understanding an historical event. One can always find some detail to quibble with, or

some archival document which suggests that, when it comes to water-shed events in the

course of history, it’s always possible to locate a trickle of water leading to said water-

shed, and a trickle leading far away from it. Still, when it comes to telling a story in

history, not all is unbridled hermeneutic relativism, and thankfully so. As Dominick

LaCapra eloquently put it, “there is in some sense interpretation all the way down, but

(…) interpretation is not homogeneous all the way down.”3 There’s always some

narrative, or evenemential, kernel that is thoroughly undisputable, that our readings,

interpretations, and analyses must, for ethical as well as epistemological reasons, take

into account. One can’t argue that Louis XVI wasn’t decapitated any more than one can

argue that Moby Dick is really a story about Judy Garland’s sister. As LaCapra has

demonstrated, this is one reason why, mutatis mutandis, the realm of historiography is not

without recalling the dilemma of recounting a traumatic event in psychoanalysis. In the

end, if the “subject” is incapable of arriving at a basic, narrativizable sense of what has

happened to her/him, that is, of incorporating the event into the his/her symbolic

universe, s/he runs the risk of getting stuck in the (destructive) logic of melancholia, of

being “possessed by the past, fac[ing] a future of impasses.”4

3
Dominick LaCapara, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001), p. 63.
4
Ibid., p. 66.
 409

Historians, from the late nineteenth-century to the present, seem similarly to be at

a loss when it comes to locating a fundamental, to say nothing of general, signification of

the Paris Commune. They seem quite simply unable to create a system of signs (signum +

fare), or a narrative code that would in some stable way relate an event that is, as David

Shaffer put it, the object of an inveterately “contested historiography”.5 The Commune is,

to put it mildly, a “contested” story for a variety of complex and intersecting reasons, not

least of which are the sheer socio-political heterogeneity of its actors, the vertiginous

multiplicity of its ideological currents, and its dynamically democratic, or indeed

“confused,” or confusing, as Peter Starr puts it, institutional structures.6 The “problem”

with the Commune is that nothing could be easier than acknowledging its chronotopical

occurrence, its referential evenementiality. From 18 March, 1871 to 28 May, 1871, the

Commune happened. What continues to occur, however, is the signification of the event

itself. What happened? To whom? Who was involved, and why? Can we quantify how

many were lost? Can we qualify what got lost? How do we make heads or tails of the

ideological, political, historical, memorial, and esthetic heterogeneity that reigned for 73

days in the capital of modern Europe in the name of that elusive subject, le peuple? How

do we discern the common traits of an event that brought together Proudhonists and

5
David Shaffer, The Paris Commune: French Politics, Culture, and Society at the Crossroads of the
Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), pp. 110-26.
6
Peter Starr, Commemorating Trauma: The Paris Commune and its Cultural Aftermath (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 22. Starr seeks to preserve a positive sense in which we can see this
confusion as one of the Commune’s key democratic achievements. David Harvey, for his part, has a
distinctly more traditional Marxist approach to this confusion. While not dismissing the ideological
heterogeneity of the Commune as wholly negative, he does argue that, once the moment to strike a decisive
blow against Versailles was lost, such confusion invariably led to the disaster that awaited the Commune in
May: “Splits between radical bourgeois, each armed with their own splendid theory of revolution; between
practical patriots and peddlers of rhetoric and dreams; between workers bewildered by events and leaders
of craft unions trying to render consistent and compelling interpretations; between loyalties to quarter, city,
and nation; between centralizers and decentralizers, all gave the Commune an air of incoherence and a
political practice riddled with internal conflict.” David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York:
Routledge, 2006), pp. 306-7.
 410

Blanquists, communists and feminists,7 neo-Jacobins, and Christian socialists, anarchists

and the petite bourgeoisie of Paris that found their lot thrust in with that of the Parisian

working classes by the Versaillais decision to lift the standing moratorium on back-rents

accumulated during the (Prussian) siege of Paris.8 Mingle all of this together with a short-

lived political experiment (about 9 weeks) that didn’t have the (historical) time to grapple

with even a minimal number of the social, economical, and political problems that it

confronted, or brought to the foreground, and we find a decidedly strange historical event

indeed, one for which radical heterogeneity seems to be the only common trait amongst

its actors. Out of this heterogeneity, we find an event that, to this day, continues to have

something of an air of the unresolved (or perhaps the irresolvable), of the in-finite to it.

And yet, or rather, precisely because of the “problems” we’ve just laid out, an

ever-similar vein of historiographical questions, interrogations, and aporias rises up to

meet the reader of the countless “histories” of the Paris Commune, whether these

7
For let there be no mistake, both the policies and the ethos of the Paris Commune appear to have been
animated by a spirit of radical equality that, although complex, not only extended to women, but was
indeed spurred on by some of the most important feminist-socialist voices in the capital, if not Europe, at
the time. The most well known of these voices belonged to Louise Michel. Elisabeth Dmitrieff was sent to
Paris by Marx as a representative of the International, and Léo Frankel, in his capacity as an elected
member of the Commune and as a delegate to the Ministries of Trade and Labor, not only voted financial
aid but also brought official political legitimacy to militant feminist organizations such as the Union des
Femmes pour la Défense de Paris et pour le Soin aux Blessés. This latter organization became something
of an unofficial sub-committee of the Commune itself. See Eugene Schulkind’s study on feminist
participation and collaboration in the Commune, “Socialist Women During the 1871 Paris Commune,” Past
and Present 106 (February, 1985), pp. 124-63. See also the chapter on popular sovereignty in Stewart
Edward’s The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 101-9; and the
chapter “Women and the Commune” in David Shafer’s The Paris Commune, op. cit., pp. 143-55.
8
See, for example, Charles Sowerwine’s France Since 1870: Culture, Politics, and Society (Hampshire and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 13-19. It goes without saying that this stunning ideological
heterogeneity of the Commune had an almost immediate (and divisive) effect on the way the revolutionary
left in Europe understood the Commune in historical terms. See, for example, Georges Haupt’s discussion
on the rift between Marx and Bakunin in his “La Commune comme exemple et comme symbole,” Le
Mouvement Social 79 (Apr.-May, 1972), pp. 210-11.
 411

histories date from the twentieth century, or from the time of the event itself, and whether

they “take sides” for the Commune or against it.9

Thus, before we begin ascertaining precisely how (not) to tell (narrate,

commemorate, problematize) a story, a supplementary question seems always already to

graft itself onto the first. That question runs as follows: “what” is it that we’re narrating,

and why? In the name of what event, values, memory, or ideology, do we insist on its

telling? Such a question merits our attention, for, when it comes to the various accounts

and the reception of the Commune in history and literature, we’re faced with a dilemma

that involves several, interlocking and related dimensions. On the one hand, there’s an

esthetic, or formal, “dilemma” (i.e, how is the story told and what is it transmitting?) that

implies an entire field of epistemological and ideological positions within which the

histoire de… is invested and situated. On the other hand, we’re faced with what we might

call a disciplinary dilemma having to do with the fact that the cultural memory of the

Paris Commune was, and in some sense continues to be, the object of a double-

repression. The Commune was the object of a real, empirical, historical repression that

9
Prosper Lissagaray, himself a former communard, wrote his Histoire de la Commune de 1871 and
published it from exile in 1876. Countless histoire de la Commune were published in France in the 1870s,
nearly all of them profoundly, and in some cases violently, critical of the Commune. See for example
Maxime du Camp’s four volume anti-communard screed (which had gone through six editions by 1883),
Les Convulsions de Paris (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1883); or Catulle Mendès’s Les 73 journées de la
Commune de Paris, published in English under the title, Paris Under the Commune, or the 73 Days of the
Second Siege (London, 1871); Jules Roquette singles out Jules Vallès as almost singularly responsible for
the fires in Paris in the preface to his Histoire de la Commune Révolutionnaire (Paris: Librairie Charles
Noblet, 1871), p. 6; and Auguste Lepage, a journalist for Le Figaro, published chez Lemerre (i.e., with the
very publishing house of the Parnassians) a similarly catastrophic account of the Paris Commune in the
same year. In Lepage’s view, the catastrophe of the Commune was due to an “excess of democracy” at the
end of the Second Empire that excited a cross-section of ignorant workers, whores, and opportunistic
declassés. Auguste Lepage, Histoire de la Commune (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1871), pp. ii-v. For
positive views of the Commune at the end of the century, see Frederick Engels, “Introduction,” The Civil
War in France: The Paris Commune – The Complete Edition of Marx’s Three Addresses on the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870-1871 and the Commune of Paris, and Lenin’s Writing’s on the Commune (New
York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 22; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On the Paris Commune
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971); see also Jean Maitron’s introduction to Prosper Lissagaray’s
L’Histoire de la Commune de 1871 (Paris: La Découverte, 1990), p. 12.
 412

sought to eradicate revolutionary politics from the capital, but it was also the object of an

imaginary, discursive repression making the objective task of its telling problematic, if

not, as was the case in during the early 1870s, close to impossible.10 It was the victim of

an injunction forming a mirror inverse of the devoir de mémoire, of a kind of officially

decreed volonté de l’oubli that sought simply to erase the event’s occurrence from the

symbolic fabric of collective memory.

The Paris Commune, if not the nineteenth-century revolutionary tradition in

France, was thus a kind of double-victim of the nineteenth century, for, as the cliché

goes, history is written by the victors. To the victors go the perhaps incalculably crucial

spoils of nominally controlling the event’s mise en discours/mémoire, of policing the

parameters of official memory.11 Indeed, one of the threads running through the present

work has consisted in interrogating the nature of Rimbaud and Vallès’s symbolic

interventions into the domain of counter-narratives and memories of the Commune in its

immediate aftermath (Rimbaud) and in the decade that followed the semaine sanglante

(Vallès). Part of this work has thus been to question the multiple dimensions in which the

10
Cf., supra, pp. 240-1. See also, Josette Parrain’s excellent article, which suggests that censorship was
much more intense in the domain of popular theatre well after the 1880 amnesty afforded by the (then
official) Third Republic than in the realm of literature, “Censure, théâtre, et Commune (1871-1914),” Le
Mouvement Social 79 (Apr.-May, 1972), pp.327-342.
11
The case of Republican historiography of the early Third Republic is in this regard particularly revealing.
As Didier Nourrisson has persuasively demonstrated, there is little daylight between the anti-Commune
hysteria of Maxime du Camp, and the official versions of the Commune that one could find in the manuels
d’histoire in the 1880s-1920s. One might also take the case of those famous lieux de mémoires, or
monuments that spatialize and legitimize memory. Unlike monuments to the victims of the siege of Paris,
which can be relatively easily found in Paris (to take but one example, the statue of the lion at Place
Denfert-Rochereau commemorates the siege of Belfort), the same cannot be said of monuments to the Paris
Commune, or the victims of the repression of the semaine sanglante. The Commune’s most famous
monument is of course the mur des fédérés in the Père Lachaise cemetery – a site marked only by a large
plaque bearing the inscription Aux morts de la Commune paid for by popular subscription. See Didier
Nourrisson, “La Commune enseignée au cours des Républiques: une affaire d’images,” in La Commune
de 1871: l’événement, les hommes, et la mémoire – actes du colloque des 15-16 mars, 2003, Claude Latta,
ed. (St. Etienne: Presses Universitaires de St. Etienne, 2004), pp. 337-58.
 413

event, the ideals, and the politics of the Commune were inscribed in the literary works of

Rimbaud and Vallès, and it is the return of this event as a kind of peri-memory12 which

we now must consider in order to conclude the present work. Let us turn, then, to

narratives of history that are not only alternative, coming from the other (side) of history,

but whose very esthetic form (i.e., in a B.D., or in a docufiction) poses the distinct

possibility of another way of figuring history, other possibilities of articulating memory

that disrupt the play of arkhè at work in the archival. Indeed, an ethos of what I’d like to

call a “se souvenir (de ce souvenir) autrement” is at the heart of two works of fiction in

two distinct genres that played a major role in what I have called the Commune’s return

today within the last ten years. Why the Commune should return today is a question that

we shall address further on.

One last paradox awaits, however, those who contemplate the “history” of the

Commune. Notably, the fact that in many respects it constitutes a “story” that continues

to be forgotten, if not repressed. This may strike the reader as a surprising statement,

given that there is no shortage of historical texts on the subject, to say nothing of the

event’s continuing mythico-imaginary resonance for the left in Europe and, to varying

degrees, across the globe. Indeed, perhaps unsurprisingly, historiographical studies of the

Commune began to flourish during the Popular Front era in France, abated somewhat in

the 1950s, returned with a vengeance by the late 1960s and early 70s, before scholarship

12
What we call “peri-memories,” or historical narratives that are de-coded and rearticulated from the silent
margins of history “proper,” could call just as easily be called souvenirs d’infans, or perhaps even
souvenirs insurrectionnels (by way of preserving a resonance with the Freudian motif of the repressed’s
resurgissement), or eventually “democratic memories” to the extent that the present enterprise has
attempted to suggest that there is no fundamental difference (even if there is a representational difference)
between the infans and the demos.
 414

on the Commune ebbs in the 1980s and 90s.13 Still, it is not impossible that, by including

a text or event in a canonical, or consensual, field, a contrary movement of exclusion can

simultaneously be generated. Such was the case, for example, of the reception of Vallès’s

oeuvre, and indeed of Rimbaud’s poetry. Legitimizing one aspect or period of their

literary work entailed forgetting another. As we have seen, in the case of both of these

writers, that “other” aspect had to do with an explicit engagement with the Paris

Commune. Jules Vallès’s L’Enfant is widely read, but L’Insurgé is not; and although Une

saison en enfer is an indispensable work in the French canon praised by esthetic

conservatives and revolutionaries alike, Rimbaud’s verse poems from 1870-71 are still

held by many outside the circle of Rimbaud specialists to be poems of uneven value, if

not poems of downright poor quality.14

More recently, Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1871) fell prey to the same

paradoxical gesture of exclusionary inclusion: ARTE, the Franco-German media

company that had partly financed the film, decided at the last possible moment not to

show the docufiction during the early evening broadcasts, when it risked reaching a

maximum audience, and opted rather to put the work in its ten o’clock time-slot. Of

course, as Watkins’s film runs nearly six hours long, this meant that the portion of the

film relating the episode of the semaine sanglante would be aired at around 3 o’clock in

the morning, ensuring thus that the story of the Commune and the message of militant

13
See the critical bibliography in La Commune de 1871: l’événement, les hommes, et la mémoire, op. cit.,
appendix.
14
In this respect, consider the revealing, near-total neglect of Rimbaud’s verse poems in Le Millénaire
Rimbaud, a collection of essays on the poet and his work by philosophers and literary critics such as Alain
Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Denis Holier. See, Le Millénaire Rimbaud (Paris: Bélin, 1993). The
exceptions to this marginalization of the early verse works are Francois Regnault’s “Comment dire du
Rimbaud” and passing sections of Rancière’s essay “Les voix et les corps”.
 415

engagement in Watkins’s film would pass in some literal sense like a dream in the

night.15

Paradoxically, this has hardly been the historic case, even in the conservative

domain of historiography. If there is some dimension in which we might see the

persistent desire or will to forget the Commune an indication of just how much the

memory of the Commune continues to trouble French history, we must not forget that

prior to the First World War, it was the object of a massive historiographical inquiry

almost without precedent. According to Paul Lidsky, nearly twelve books on the Siege

and the Commune of Paris were published every month between 1871-1873, and, as

Bertrand Taithe has shown, the figures are even more astronomical when one factors in

the various studies, histories, and memoirs of the Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the

Second Empire, and the Siege of Paris written between 1871 and 1900 (more than 7,000

in toto).16

As Lidsky demonstrates in his study of novels, shorts-stories, memoirs, and

histories of the Commune written in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the aims

of such a discursive operation were frequently diverse, but the cumulative effect was the

same: in nearly every case, writing about the Commune, be it in fictional or non-fictional

venues, constituted an extremely effective depoliticization of the event itself, of

disavowing the Commune’s status qua collective, democratic upheaval generated by the

contradictions of French society at the end of the Second Empire. However, it hardly

15
See, Geoff Bowie (dir.), The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins, DVD (Canada, National
Film Board of Canada, 2001), A First Run/Icarus Films.
16
Paul Lidsky, Les Écrivains contre la Commune (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), pp. 41-78. Bertrand Taithe,
Defeated Flesh: Medcine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1999), p. 5.
 416

suffices to deny that there was anything political to the Commune.17 The Commune was

therefore not only depoliticized, it was “naturalized”. It was explained away by

submitting it to a gaze of knowledge capable of discerning the biopolitical symptoms of a

mass pathology that seized Parisians in the spring of 1871 (e.g., fièvre obsidionale).

Where medical appeals to collective pathologies failed, the archetype of the inherently

pathological individual, the mauvais ouvrier, was mobilized. Indeed, we might argue that

representations of the Commune and of communards sound the death knell of the

bourgeois fantasy of the classes dangereuses before this socio-imaginary category comes

into contact with the human sciences and morphs into discourses of racialized difference

applied to any potential menace from within (cf., Lombroso, Gobineau, etc.). However,

before the vitriolic anti-worker rhetoric of the classes dangereuses slips into oblivion, it

goes out with an apoplectic explosion of semiotic violence. In the aftermath of the

Commune, the good worker, the ‘Jean Macquart’ who remains attached to the

transcendental racial metonym of the sol français and who couldn’t care less for, or

understand, politics, is opposed to the radical abjection of the mauvais ouvrier, the

sodden, lazy, pseudo-intellectual egomaniac who, by a freak turn of events, managed to

seize power in Paris in the spring of 1871.18

17
See Paul Lidksy, op. cit.. See also the indispensable critical and historical bibliography of works directly
inspired by the Commune between 1871 and 1914 in Anne Roche and Gérard Delfau’s “La Commune et le
roman français,” Le Mouvement Social 79 (Apr.-May, 1972), pp. 317-18.
18
It is no small irony that many of the extremely conservative writers, such as Louis Veuillot, Alexandre
Dumas fils, Maxime du Camp, and even Zola, whom one could not accuse of anti-Republican sentiments,
who indulge at length in portraits of the demos, the barbarian within, seem to be channeling Marx’s quip
about Napoléon III’s regime representing the arrival of the lumpenproletariat to the heights of power.
Perhaps this is no mere coincidence, but on the level of the textual and political unconscious of the post-
Commune period, inadvertently represents, like a lapsus calami, the degree to which such writers are
unconsciously aware that, on the one hand, the Commune was indeed a political event, and, on the other,
the socio-political, economic, and historical context in which the Commune emerged had not been changed
in any meaningful way since the fall of the Empire. In other words, the image of the mauvais ouvrier is of
course pure ideology, but it also suggests the degree to which the bourgeoisie was aware that the only way
 417

Initially, then, the Commune was written about, but in such a way that it emerged

as a non-event, or rather, as a distinctly non-political event. As we have argued, Arthur

Rimbaud and Jules Vallès resist this neutralization by re-writing the Commune back into

History, and back into politics. The mere fact that they did so suggests that the Commune

was at first the object of a historico-esthetic narrative seeking to deny one mode of

reading in order to affirm another, more ideologically reassuring of the event.

Yet, like any process of repression, this process of forgetting is not without its

contradictions, its gaps through which the repressed returns. If it is thus initially

unavoidable to write the history of the Commune so as to disavow its evenementiality,

literary and historical counter-narratives emerge almost just as quickly, best exemplified

by the works of Jules Vallès, Louise Michel and Paule Minck’s19 memoires, Prosper

Lissagaray’s Histoire de la Commune and, later, Georges Darien’s Vallésian-inspired Bas

les coeurs!. Still, there’s a curious phenomenon to be noted in at least two of these texts.

In both Vallès’s Insurgé and Darien’s Bas les coeurs!, a strange incapacity to narrate the

event of the Commune can be detected.20 Though the Commune does not suffer as

dramatic a diegetical reduction as in Zola’s La Débâcle, Vallès nevertheless relegates

narration of the event of the Commune to the latter third of his novel, and even then

proceeds to operate a kind of temporal apocope by which we skip from the election of the

to contain class conflict in the 1870s was, in final analysis, through the application of “naturalized”
violence.
19
Minck was a long-time feminist and socialist activist and opposition journalist who, under the Commune,
transformed the St. Pierre de Montmartre church into a free, secular school. Along with Louise Michel,
André Léo, Léon Richer, and others, she was a co-founder of the Association des droits de la femme, an
important organization that advocated on behalf of working-women, organized public meetings and
readings, and militated for reform of laws restricting women’s access to the public sphere. Cf., Bernard
Noel, Dictionnaire de la Commune (Montréal: La Mémoire du Livre, 2000), p. 437. Claire Goldberg
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984),
p. 173.
20
Vallès died before finishing L’Insurgé, however. There’s thus no real way of knowing whether he might
have expanded the scope of his narrative to include more on the Commune during the month of April,
1871.
 418

Commune at the end of March to the beginning of the month of May, eliding much of the

Commune itself, as it were. Georges Darien’s Bas les coeurs! ends with an acerbic and

devastating critique of the bourgeoisie as a class, and of nationalism as a lethal

configuration of ideology. However, the narration cannot quite directly confront the scale

and scope of the repression of the Commune, resulting in a kind of anamorphosis that is

symbolically codified in the narrator’s position as a child indirectly witnessing the events

of the spring of 1871 from Versailles, the very site of a repression that is only

metonymically apprehensible in the form of soldiers, and then prisoners, being marched

through town, in catching a glimpse of Adolphe Thiers, the “vieil assassin,” and in the

spectral sound of the bombardment of Paris.21

There is thus a two-fold interest in what I’m calling the Commune’s return in our

own time, in the form of a four volume bande dessinée by Jacques Tardi,22 Le Cri du

peuple, and Peter Watkins’s magisterial La Commune (Paris, 1871). Both seek in ways

that in some cases present both a positive and, in some regards more explicit, narrative of

(engagement with) the Commune. What calls for further attention in both of these recent

re-inscriptions, or re-presentations of the Paris Commune, is above all the fact that at an

ideological and historical moment when it might have seemed that we, in the present,

have staked out a kind of non-negotiable distance from the Paris Commune, the reference

to the Commune comes back with renewed force. But why does it persist in returning

now? Why does it insist on disturbing the angelic stasis of our “post-political,” post-

historical universe? And why, indeed, does it return in these esthetic forms rather than in

21
Georges Darien, Bas les coeurs! (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 281-3, 322, 333-5.
22
Adapted from Jean Vautrin’s eponymous popular novel, Le Cri du peuple (Paris: Le Livre de Poche,
1999). Note, of course, the hypotextual importance of Jules Vallès, who is not only one of the principal
characters in both the novel and its adaptation, but whose journal published under the Commune was
entitled, precisely, Le Cri du peuple.
 419

the guise of an umpteenth historical study? Is there perhaps something in them like the

trace of Rimbaud and Vallès’s literary politics, that is, an esthetic operation preserving

the democratic disruption and ethos that was at the heart of the Commune? The interest

of these para-literary, para-historical works is that they manage to respond to the ethical

challenge of finding an esthetic form not only for history, but for this story. Where

certain narratives of the Commune have fallen into silence, Watkins’s film and Tardi’s

bande dessinée attempt in their own way to respond to the challenge of the “what” and

the “how” that has plagued narratives of the Paris Commune in history and literature

since 1871. What we propose, then, is to take a closer look at these two works in order to

address the following problematics: how do they intervene in the history of the

Commune? How do they interrogate the temporal divide separating the present from the

past in a way that reduces the ideological gap between the two? Finally, how do they

strive to prolong into the present the work of democracy that was simultaneously the

heart and the Achilles’ heel of the Commune?

II. Democratizing the B.D. – or, a Tardi-ve Re-Writing of the Commune

In a radio interview, Jacques Tardi remarked that, in some form or another, his

work has long been haunted by the intersecting epistemological and ethical themes of

crime, history, and limit experiences.23 Indeed, if Tardi made a name for himself adapting

Léo Mallet’s hard-scrabble detective, Nestor Burma, to the genre of the graphic novel, his

breakthrough truly occurred in 1993 with a B.D. on the First World War, C’était la

23
Jacques Tardi is of course an extremely well-known French graphic artist who has not only adapted
numerous novels (e.g., Voyage au bout de la nuit, Léo Mallet’s detective novels, etc.), but is perhaps most
well known for his noir detective series situated around the turn of the 20th century. Jacques Tardi, “Radio
Interview with Thomas Baumgartner,” La Fabrique de l’Histoire (France-Culture), 03/06/08.
 420

guerre des tranchées, a graphic novel following the stories of anonymous poilus through

the daily horror-show and traumatism of trench-warfare. Tardi’s esthetic, ethical, and

political modus operandi thus not only consists in seeking out episodes of massive

historical violence that pose a problem and perhaps identify a limit to the adequation of

representation and memory, it also consists in seeking out and putting into discourse the

micro-histories of the actors involved in such upheavals, the stories of those who didn’t

manage to make the cut of History.

Such is the case of Tardi’s adaptation of Jean Vautrin’s 1999 novel, Le Cri du

peuple. Published in four volumes between 2001 and 2004, Tardi’s Cri du peuple is

striking for its generic heterogeneity. Intermingling formal aspects of the historical,

detective, and romance novels throughout the first three volumes of the B.D., Tardi

follows the trajectory of several characters whose stories intersect in complex manners

throughout a narrative taking place on the background of the Commune and, eventually,

the semaine sanglante.24

It would be incorrect, however, to argue that the Commune’s sole diegetical

purpose is to serve as a tumultuous historical back-drop to the “main” plot. As Tardi

himself has remarked,25 there are indeed moments when the Commune becomes

something like an actor in its own (hi)story, fully occupying the devant de la scène and

irremediably upending the fate of the text’s characters. Antoine Tarpagnan,26 for

24
This colorful cast of characters includes a Basque captain who joins the Communards on the 18th of
March, a detective seeking to solve the mystery of a series of murders perpetrated by a criminal gang à la
Patron Minette whose base is a bordello near the Parisian ramparts, a detective with a shadowy past
seeking the man he believes to be responsible for the murder of his ward, a prostitute with a heart of gold,
circus freaks, an adolescent who joins the fédérés, Jules Vallès, Gustave Courbet, and other historical
figures who took part in the Commune.
25
Jacques Tardi, “Radio Interview,” op. cit.
26
As Georges Mathieu has noted, the very name of this protagonist contains something of a Vallésian
semiotic playfulness of heterogeneity and profanation, echoing both with the dashingly heroic figure of
 421

example, is a captain sent to Montmartre to retake the cannons on the Champs polonais.

Refusing to obey his orders to shoot into the crowd gathered to prevent the Versaillais

soldiers from confiscating the cannons, Tarpagnan himself becomes a kind of metaphor

for the success of the revolution. The Commune plays a crucial formal and esthetic role

on the level of plot (i.e., that of persistent deferral of the final resolution, as Peter Brooks

would put it)27 for Charles Bassicoussé, an undercover detective who believes Tarpagnan

to be guilty of the brutal murder of his adopted daughter, and who spends much of the

novel in a kind of interweaving spiral with Tarpagnan, hunting him down, catching a

glimpse of him, but being separated from his prey by the upheavals taking place in the

city, by a crowd, or by the invading Versaillais forces. The real criminal in this matter is,

furthermore, a certain priest named Ségouret28 who happens to find himself in prison next

to the very same Archbishop Darboy whom the Versaillais government let perish,

Dumas’s D’Artagnan and the 20th-century detective anti-hero Eugène Tarpon from Jean-Patrick
Manchette’s novels. It’s indeed as though Tarpagnan were a porte-manteau calembour in which one were
supposed to hear the collapsing of esthetic registers into a single signifier, which is less a nom propre than
a nom impropre. Cf., Georges Mathieu, “Comme un fauve en case: quelques remarques sur la
représentation de Vallès dans la bande dessinée, Le Cri du peuple,” Autour de Vallès 39 (2009), pp. 209-10,
n. 3.
27
Indeed, as Brooks puts it, the detective novel, of which, Le Cri du peuple is certainly an example in a
variety of ways, dealing at once with a hermeneutic and an historical crime, is the “purest example of the
hermeneutic,” that is, the suspension, blockage, and eventual resolution of answers and questions that
structure a narrative on the level of what Barthes would call its proairetic logic, or, the actions and events
that constitute its plot. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge
and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 18
28
Note the onomastic calembour phonetically inscribed in the proper noun, Ségouret: by an effect of
homonymy, Ségouret is also s’est gourré. In other words, and in this respect both Vautrin and Tardi are no
doubt deliberately playing with the structure-epistemological code of the detective novel (i.e., that we, as
readers, don’t know in advance the answer to the proverbial question: “Who done it”?), by transforming the
“proper” (i.e., the Name, the Nom du Père, and indeed the figure of nineteenth-century moral propriety that
is the priest) into a kind of meta-hermeneutic wink at the reader who, to the degree that they are attentive to
the poetics of the text, may realize that Bassicoussé s’est gourré with respect to the identity of his adopted
daughter’s murderer.
 422

calculating, as Marx (rightly) quipped, that he’d be much more useful as a cadaver than

alive.29

Putting images to the history of the Commune, to say nothing of inserting it

within a heterogeneous para-literary genre that asks its readers to be literary and

historical detectives, entails at least two difficulties. First and foremost, there is a

methodological and imaginary difficulty. Tardi is dealing with an ekphrastic medium

situated between the visual and the textual, and yet precious little photographic

documentation from the period between 18 March and 28 May is still in existence. To

accommodate the neo-realist esthetic that informs his work, Tardi was therefore faced

with the task not of faithfully reproducing the actions and actors of the Commune on a

referential level, but rather in terms of fidelity to a certain idea, or ideology, of the

Commune as it resonates in the present.

A further, ethical dilemma compounds this esthetico-referential obstacle to re-

constituting and re-presenting the Commune. This dilemma resides in the fact that many

of the characters in Le Cri du peuple are not fictional characters. The reader crosses paths

with Gustave Courbet, Eugène Varlin, Léo Frankel, Raoul Rigault, and Jules Vallès, who

is presented as Antoine Tarpagnan’s cousin via the Vingtras side of their common,

imaginary genealogy. We are thus dealing with a supplementary kind of generical

destabilization melding biography, history, and fiction in a manner that is not without

recalling Vallès’s own distinct ‘autobio-fictive’ mode of writing. Indeed, more than any

other historical figure, Vallès’s role in Le Cri du peuple is a central one. Not only does

29
Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 79. Tardi incidentally makes an intertextual gesture towards Marx by slipping this
boutade into the mouth of one of Ségouret’s guards: “Tu n’espères tout de même pas que Thiers va libérer
Blanqui…Parce qu’un archevêque de plus ou de moins…Foutriquet a besoin d’un cadavre de haut vol. Il te
veut martyre pour justifier ses envies de massacre.” Jacques Tardi, Le Cri du peuple, t. 3 (Paris:
Castermann, 2004), p. 43.
 423

his revolutionary journal furnish the title for Vautrin and Tardi’s re-writing of the

Commune, but a number of episodes from Vallès’s L’Insurgé appear to have made their

way directly into the B.D. itself, thus further blurring the line between intertext and text.

Either out of a concern for historical coherence, or motivated by an ethical position,30

Tardi indeed at one point confirmed that he would never make his Vallès say anything

that the extra-literary Vallès didn’t put in the mouth of the protagonist/narrator of

L’Insurgé.31 In this respect, Tardi’s accomplishment is not only ethically admirable, it is

formally intriguing. He not only respects but reproduces, as it were, Vallès’s most

revolutionary (and least well-known) text; and Tardi manages to do so while allowing

this intertext to overwhelm his own at moments. For each time the reader crosses paths

with Vallès/Vingtras in Le Cri du peuple, the intertextual reference is not only easily

localized within the Vallésian text, the two quite simply converge in a kind of

collaboration that dislocates temporal and generic boundaries.32

If such a respect for the texts of the Commune can have its limits, they prove to be

highly productive ones. There is no doubt that Tardi shows a fastidious esthetic attention

to detail and respect for the texts of the dead. His work, counter-intuitive as it may seem,

may be understood as responding to the formal demands of the documentary film. While

maintaining its own difference with respect to the event, it strives to reproduce the event

faithfully for the reader, going so far as to esthetically represent archival documents such

as the official proclamation of the Commune that covered the walls of Paris in late of

30
Namely, the question is: to what extent does one have the right to play the role of ventriloquist with the
dead?
31
Jacques Tardi, “Radio Interview,” op. cit.
32
The end of the third tome of Le Cri du peuple, for instance, neatly coincides with the final pages of
L’Insurgé, a coincidence that, furthermore, closes Vautrin’s novel (which ends with Vallès in exile,
planning to write a series of novels inspired by his cousin Vingtras (i.e., Antoine Tarpagnan) whom he
“ressemble tant”. Jean Vautrin, Le Cri du Peuple, op. cit., p. 631.
 424

March of 1871. Nevertheless, it is occasionally easy to detect a note of irony at work in

Tardi’s graphic novel, an awareness of the artist’s own creative activity to which Tardi

draws our attention in a manner that is at once subtle and extremely visible.

Take for example the episode from Le Cri du peuple (also related in L’Insurgé)33

where Vallès/Vingtras explains to Tarpagnan that, due to a misunderstanding caused by

the fact that he shaved his beard, he was nearly beaten to death by a crowd who took him

for a Versaillais spy. By way of explanation, Vallès/Vingtras offers that he only shaved

off his recognizable beard upon the suggestion of a friend named Tardy: “Tu as vu ça,

Antoine? Ils ont bien failli me coller au mur! Tout ça à cause de Tardy.” To which

Tarpagnan responds with a curious question that seems to be addressed more to the

reader than it is situated on the level of narration: “Tardi? (…) Tardi avec un ‘I’, ou un

‘y’? (…) Mais qui est ce Tardy?”34 To these interrogations, Tardi imports verbatim a

passage from L’Insurgé : “ Tardy est un ancien camarade de collège, pauvre, plus pauvre

que moi ! À qui je paye un cabinet garni, près de ma chambre, et qui gagne sa part à la

gamelle en recopiant ce que j’écris.”35

There are a number of noteworthy phenomena taking place in this short passage.

First, we’ll notice a fundamentally Vallésian tendency to subvert the normative,

productive, exchange economy of language by adding a metastatic dimension of

repetition, re-writing, and copying to the activity of writing. It is also, and perhaps even

more, noteworthy that through the intervention of the fictional Tarpagnan, the Vallésian

text is both faithfully copied and reproduced with an important difference. Tardi, the

author of Le Cri du peuple, appears in this passage to be deliberately playing with our

33
Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), p. 269.
34
Jacques Tardi, op. cit., p. 56.
35
Ibid.; Jules Vallès, op. cit., p. 134.
 425

expectations as readers that the domains of author and character/subject remain

ontologically and esthetically distinct in any work where an “autobiographical pact”

hasn’t been agreed upon from the outset.36 There is, furthermore, an intriguing temporal

problem at work here. Indeed, Tardi collapses two chapters from L’Insurgé together in

order to arrive at this moment of self-reflexive textual irony; he collapses chapter 12,

where Vallès mentions his impoverished friend Tardy, a chapter narratively situated in

1869, into the near-death scene from chapter 31, thus taking place in May of 1871. Why

Tardi, who has elsewhere expressed his intention to not take liberties with the past, would

open himself up to precisely such an accusation is a bit of a mystery indeed, but it is not

an entirely impenetrable one. A clue to this mystery can be found in ‘Tardy’s’ chambre

garnie, the very same where Vallès/Vingtras takes refuge from the Versaillais army and

that thus literally saves Vallès/Vingtras’s life at the end of L’Insurgé (if not in reality).

The key to the mystery of these intertextual and textual anachronisms37 has to do

with a specific type of strategic textual and political engagement that purposefully seeks

to draw the reader’s attention to their activity as readers and agents, as active

collaborators of meaning-making (of signification) who are not only reading a detective

story, but who are also repeating the forgotten story of the Commune (that “Tardy/I” is

re-writing) itself in the present moment. Such is the meaning of the vignette following the

above-cited exchange between Vallès and his cousin where Tarpagnan appears to directly

36
See Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
37
By anachronism, we are referring to the collapsing of chapters from L’Insurgé, the destabilization of the
channel of interlocution in the passage above, and the ironic, self-aware nature of Tardi’s esthetic
representation of the Commune and of his own text’s relationship to Vallès’s Insurgé.
 426

address the reader of the B.D. and affirms: “J’en ai connu un [i.e., un Tardy/i] avec un

‘I.’”38

Jacques Tardi, Le Cri du peuple, vol. 3

Tardi’s text thus engages with the text from the past, playing the role of a

mediator creating links between the intertext of the past and the reader of the text in the

present. What is perhaps most remarkable in the passage cited above is that he seems to

desire that the reader be keenly, almost uncomfortably, conscious of the kinds of esthetic,

textual, and historical choices he is making as an artist. Directly addressing the reader is,

what’s more, a way of making the choice of actively engaging oneself in a story

simultaneously the choice of the reader, who is thus thrust into the story being told as a

kind of imagined interlocutor with history. In essence, what Tardi’s B.D. proposes is a

38
Jacques Tardi, op. cit., p. 56. The same technique of strategic framing of an actor/character’s gaze so as
to make to overflow the border between the spaces of reading/viewing and spaces of narration, making the
former active spaces of collaboration, is extremely important in Peter Watkins’s film La Commune (Paris
1871).
 427

model of historical and political intervention insisting that we re-read the texts of the

past, be they poems, history books, or novels, not as immobilized artifacts, not as dead

letters with respect to which we always already arrive too late, but as spaces of narration

and of history that can be modified, re-articulated, re-evaluated and made to signify

differently by an act of critical intervention – by a re-writing. As a case in point, let us

consider the following example.

In the third volume of Le Cri du peuple, Lili, a young communard, is arrested by

Versaillais soldiers shortly after their entry into Paris. Lined up against the wall of a

garden along with other prisoners, she appears to be on the verge of becoming yet another

drop in the ocean of blood that inundated Paris in May of 1871 when (what

retrospectively turns out to be) a strategic ruse occurs to her: she leaves the ranks of the

arrested and addresses the commanding officer of the execution squad, asking that she be

allowed to go and bring a watch to her mother. After promising to come back, the officer

allows her to leave on the condition that, if she were not to return within three minutes,

he would personally go and kill both Lili and her mother.39

39
Jacques Tardi, op. cit., p. 74.
 428

Jacques Tardi, Le Cri du peuple, vol. 4

Now, if this pathos laden scene seems vaguely familiar, it’s indeed for a

compelling reason: it’s actually a citation of a well-known poem by Victor Hugo entitled

“Sur une barricade”:

Sur une barricade, au milieu des pavés

Souillés d'un sang coupable et d'un sang pur lavés,
Un enfant de douze ans est pris avec des hommes.
- Es-tu de ceux-là, toi ? - L'enfant dit : Nous en sommes.
- C'est bon, dit l'officier, on va te fusiller.
Attends ton tour. - L'enfant voit des éclairs briller,
Et tous ses compagnons tomber sous la muraille.
Il dit à l'officier : Permettez-vous que j'aille
Rapporter cette montre à ma mère chez nous ?
- Tu veux t'enfuir ? - Je vais revenir. - Ces voyous
Ont peur ! où loges-tu ? - Là, près de la fontaine.
Et je vais revenir, monsieur le capitaine.
- Va-t'en, drôle ! - L'enfant s'en va. - Piège grossier !
Et les soldats riaient avec leur officier,
Et les mourants mêlaient à ce rire leur râle ;
Mais le rire cessa, car soudain l'enfant pâle,
Brusquement reparu, fier comme Viala,
Vint s'adosser au mur et leur dit : Me voilà.
 429

La mort stupide eut honte et l'officier fit grâce.

[...]40

There are a number of characteristically Hugolian traits that stand out in this

poem, not least of which is the stylistically recognizable romantic trimeter deployed in

the dialogue between the child and the officer, and indeed the Gavroche-like ambivalent

adequation of the recklessly courageous child and le peuple. Notice, for example, that

when the boy is first addressed, he responds with a “nous” that could either be taken for

street-slang or for the nous de majesté, the nous linguistically embodying popular

sovereignty. The simile, fier comme Viala also appears as a line whose meaning is far

from stable – indeed, recalling that Viala was one of the child-heros of the Grande

Révolution (along with Bara), it is not impossible to draw the apparently subversive

conclusion from the coda of this poem that it is the Commune, and not the government in

Versailles, that represents the political legacy and legitimacy of the Revolution of 1789.

Yet, this conclusion is not without its limits, and the likelihood that an officer of

the Versaillais army would be moved to humanity in extremis by the transcendental grace

of L’Être Suprême, or touched by the child-like honesty and bravery of the peuple

fighting to preserve the ideals of the Republic, seems so far-fetched that the only

conclusion one inevitably draws from Hugo’s poem is that it is something like early

Third Republic propaganda at its purest: it focuses on the humanity, if indeed not the

politically neutral humanism, of the executioners rather than on the inhumanity of the

deed.

However, where Hugo’s latest avatar of Gavroche is willing to keep his promise

to return and put his back up against the killing-wall, Tardi’s môme is obviously not so

40
Victor Hugo, L’Année Terrible (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 175.
 430

quick to keep her word. Where Hugo would have been content to lament the death of a

child qua metaphor of a menaced innocence to which the poet clings in several passages

from L’Année terrible,41 Tardi seizes upon the pretext of the watch, as well as upon the

Hugolian pre-text, in order to subvert both, metamorphosizing the very symbol of time, if

not of history itself, into a textual intervention in favor of the Commune. Lili seduces this

figure of power, just as Tardi seduces (in the etymological sense of “to lead astray”) the

authority of the Hugolian text, forcing it into a political context that the poet sought in

many respects to avoid during the semaine sanglante. As for Lili, she gets the literal last

word of the entire oeuvre: addressing the reader, she and her companion Ziquet declare

their intent to continue the struggle for equality that the Paris Commune represented.

Ultimately, Lili is an allegory for the artist himself, using the space of the text to

continue, prolong and overwhelm the present with the emancipatory politics and

struggles of the past.

In final analysis, there’s a sense in which Tardi’s text literally prolongs the texts

with which he engages. In Vautrin’s novel, for instance, the narrative more or less ends

with the cataclysm of the night of May 24, 1871. However, at the end of the third volume

of his B.D., Tardi announces an esthetic and ethical choice to prolong the book he has

been adapting into a book that is both the fruit of a collaboration and uniquely his own. In

effect, the fourth volume of Tardi’s Le Cri du peuple goes beyond Vautrin’s novel, and

becomes a profoundly engaged artistic work of Tardi’s own, grappling with and refusing

to pass over in silence the repression of the Commune. Furthermore, we might be

tempted to see in the very medium that Tardi employs something of a fortuitous metaphor

41
See especially the poem “Avril” in L’Année Terrible, which closes on the alexandrine: “Je n’abdiquerai
pas – mon droit à l’innocence.” Victor Hugo, op. cit., p. 134.
 431

for his entire project of (re)writing the (hi)story of the Paris Commune. A graphic novel,

especially in Europe, aims at and generally attains a much larger, more diverse readership

than historical studies or even popular novels can dream of reaching.42 In theory, the

medium of the graphic novel is a democratized medium, allowing for what Foucault

would call a “histoire subjuguée”43 to re-emerge and engage with a heterogeneous public

– it allows, in a word, for the histoire subjuguée to become a histoire insurrectionnelle.

The recounting of the story of the Commune in B.D. form manages not only to re-

appropriate a subjugated, discursively disqualified, silenced (hi)story, its very esthetic

form democratizes this (hi)story in the process. In this respect, the esthetic approach and

democratic engagement that Tardi adopts towards the subject of the Paris Commune have

much in common indeed with the work of Peter Watkins, to whose La Commune we now

turn.

III. An-Archic Cinema: Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1871)

Peter Watkins is a British cinematographer who seems to enjoy inhabiting the role of

provocateur. Since his directorial debuts with 1965’s The War Game and his 1970

follow-up Punishment Park,44 Watkins has been known as much for the “controversial”

42
By late 2003, that is, before the final two volumes had even appeared, Tardi’s Le Cri du peuple had
already sold more than 135, 000 copies, making it a veritable best-seller in France. See,
http://www.actuabd.com/Record-de-la-production-BD-en-France-en-2003-1730-albums-publies-15-9
43
Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Interviews, 1972-
1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 81-82: “By subjugated knowledges I mean two things: on the
one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist
coherence or formal systematization (…). [O]n the other hand, I believe that by subjugated knowledges,
one should understand something else (…): namely, a whole set of knowledges whose history has been
disqualified (…); a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity
and which owes its force (…) to the harshness with which it is opposed.”
44
The War Game was banned by the BBC for over 20 years, and Punishment Park, a docufiction filmed in
the United States that takes as its premise the FBI’s emergency Cold War plan to round up political radicals
in the United States and place them in desert concentration camps, was pulled from theaters four days after
 432

subject matter of his films as for his stylistic approach blending the nouvelle vague’s

penchant for using non-professional actors (in the case of La Commune, for instance,

many of the actors had in fact never previously acted in film or theater) and an inimitable

hybrid form of film making for which Alexandre Labarussiat coined the neologism

“docufiction,” a cinematographic invention deploying a documentary-like esthetic within

a fictional narrative. The docufiction thus destabilizes the genre of the “historical

documentary” itself, critically drawing the spectator’s attention, much in the same way

Tardi does, not only to the “constructedness” of the film they are watching but also to the

ideological investments that inform the operation of “documenting” the truth of an

historical event.45 In 1999, Watkins began filming his latest “docufiction” in a tiny studio

in Paris’s 11th arrodissement. La Commune (Paris 1871) thus represents the culmination

of Watkins’s attempts to create an alternative esthetic and politics for the cinema, one

that indeed alters not only traditional modes of narration, but that explicitly seeks to

problematize the divide between spectator and film, between actor and activist (or acting

and agency).46 Let us place this innovative re-configuration of rapports between

its New York premier in 1970. See Alexandre Labarussiat, “Peter Watkins: Cinéaste Militant,” Dossiers
(Novembre, 2006), p. 3. Available on-line at, http://www.critikat.com/ Peter-Watkins.html.
45
As Labarussiat states, “ce mélange de genres n’est pas un effet de style gratuit, mais un acte de création
subversive et engagé contre une idéologie véhiculée par l’industrie des mass-medias (…). [L]e docu-fiction
bouscule les concepts de ‘vérité’ ou de ‘réalité cinématographique’ tels que les ont instaurés les médias de
masse (télévision en tête).” Ibid., p. 3.
46
Ibid., p. 8 We’d like to emphasize the alter preserved in the term “alternative cinema,” as an esthetic
form that places the spectator before a political choice that can symbolically transform them into actors. For
what is being staged in Watkins’s docufictions, or in Tardi’s re-writings of the scripts/texts of the past, is
the imperative of the alter that is, as Derrida suggests, at the very heart of democracy. This “alter”
encompasses the alternatives to democracy (the authoritarianism of the arkhè, for example), the alternative
of democracy as an achievable collective aim of the community, and the alternance of power and voices in
democracy. The authoritarian “alternative to” the democratic ideal of equality, furthermore, is a problem
that Watkins himself theorizes under the name of the monoform, in the prefix of which, mono, we can hear,
of course, the deafening absence of the alter, of the other. In a word, the “monoform” is a certain
instrumentalization of power (in the mass-media, but also in public institutions of government) that
produces a sentiment of alienation – i.e., simply the sensation that one cannot be an actor in one’s life, that
one’s (political, critical, collective, social, etc.) choices are limited by a totally alien force or structure that
 433

spectators and film, and indeed between actors and director, under the sign of what we

might call a cinema of participatory democracy. I propose that we analyze such a

cinematography at the intersection of politics and esthetics, and that we attempt to

determine to what degree its critical operations share in, and indeed strive to re-produce,

the ethos of its object, the Paris Commune.

The esthetic choice of creating a work of “docufiction” operates in a meta-

cinematographic dimension, representing in and of itself a critical intervention in the

narrative composition of the story being told as well as in the domain of History,

understood as a discursive configuration that decides, with varying degrees of success,

upon the ‘truth’ of an event. Throughout La Commune (Paris, 1871), Peter Watkins

decomposes and recomposes the diegetical contours, that is, the divide between the

present and the past, between historical documentary and fictive re-telling, of his film in

several manners. Amongst these narrative destabilizations we find a recurrent tendency to

interrupt his actors and to ask them to comment upon their roles in the film.

In a strictly traditional sense of the distribution of roles in cinematography,

Watkins asks something close to the impossible of his actors, something that

superimposes the esthetic and political senses of the terms “actors” and “roles”: he asks

that they stop their role-playing, that they break-out of a fixed role over which they have

minimal epistemological or esthetical control, that they quite simply break out of their

traditional representation; he asks that they participate actively in the creation of meaning

within the representational space of the docufiction.

is unresponsive to demands. See Jacques Derrida, Voyous (Paris: Gallilée, 2002), p. 54. See also Geoff
Bowie’s interview with Peter Watkins in The Universal Clock, op. cit.
 434

In viewing La Commune, one senses, furthermore, that this is a spontaneous tactic

on the part of the director. For these metaleptic interrogations are occasionally the object

of a misunderstanding between the actor and the director. In at least one instance,

Watkins asks a young actress what her thoughts are on the events being depicted around

her, namely the proclamation of the Commune at the Hôtel de Ville. The actress begins to

respond by explaining what she thinks her character might have been likely to think

about the scene, expressing a sense of hope in the future, a sense that the impossible is

possible after all. Watkins’s response is, however, to interrupt her and specify: “Non, pas

le personnage; toi, qu’est-ce que tu en penses, toi?”47

Watkins’s technical and ideological aim resides less in bridging a gap between the

actor and the action than in creating a kind of critical gap between the two in which the

actor is asked to comment less upon what a specific character may think of such or such

scene than upon what they, in their roles as actors, spectators of history, and citizens

think about the representation of the Commune they are in the midst of constructing. The

aim, in other words, is to turn the play of representation and meaning over to the actors,

to give them a sense of agency over the story being told. Perhaps somewhat obliquely,

these spontaneous interrogations point to what Marx was getting at when, in the

Economic Manuscripts of 1844, he dreams of a society in which human beings would

play multiple roles, in which they would be, as it were, actors in the morning, historians

in the afternoon, critical thinkers in the evening.48

47
Peter Watkins, La Commune de Paris, 1871, op. cit.
48
Or, as Rimbaud put it in Une saison en enfer, “À chaque être, plusieurs autres vies me semblaient dues.”
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, R. Tucker, ed.
(New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978), pp. 95-6.
 435

Continuing in this vein of spatio-temporal and esthetic interference, a word merits

being said on Watkins’s deterritorialization of the role of the “carton,” an epistemological

framing device wherein the action of the film is momentarily interrupted and a shot

appears on the screen, traditionally in order to provide the viewer with some sort

historical information attesting to, or discursively supporting, the veracity of the events

depicted on the screen. In La Commune (Paris, 1871), such inserts play an important role.

However, their presence in the film ultimately renders the technique itself slightly

uncanny. In effect, the ‘historical insert’ is first and foremost deterritorialized by a

temporal delay of a couple of seconds during which the spectator confronts a darkened

screen. These empty frames separate the interruption of the “story” from the intervention

of “Historical” information. In this temporal, diegetical, and visual décalage, with the

viewer plunged symbolically into a literally obscure space which we might

metaphorically consider as a “trou de mémoire,” a strange sort of excess of story over

history occurs during which the diegetical sound of the scene that was just interrupted

spills-over into the space of historical commentary. The effect of this visual, auditory,

and epistemic disjunction is a kind of transhistorical blurring in which the empirical past

becomes sensually indistinguishable from the present, from the scene from which the

spectator has just been abruptly separated. As the film progresses towards the tragic

climax of the semaine sanglante, these “cartons” indeed abandon their purely

“informational” status, becoming the occasion of a direct political engagement, inciting

the spectator to create transtemporal links between the events depicted in the film and

extra-cinematographic struggles in the present-day, such as the increasing socio-

 436

economic gulf separating the haves from the have-nots and the expulsion of a group of

“sans-papiers” from a Parisian church in 1999.

Watkins thus subverts what we might call a monolithic mode of producing cinema

that depends on the authority of the director and the unity of the script through a

democratic distribution of roles and speech in his film. Such subversions take place in

two important dimensions. First, as there was no script for the film, the actors were asked

to write and perform their own lines irrespective of the roles they were performing.49

Second, continuing in this democratic ethos, Watkins’s includes in the film moments that

are not, stricto sensu, part of the narrative, but which incorporate rather the action of the

film and the event of history into the daily lives of the film’s actors. Watkins thus films

his actors and actresses in frequently touching moments of collective dialogue taking

place between scenes. In such scenes, which cannot, however, entirely be considered as

extra-diegetical, they express their impressions, admiration, fears, and even

condemnation of certain events of the Commune. They also discuss contemporary

political problems and struggles that resonate in their mind with the hopes raised and

ideals expressed during the Paris Commune, touching, for example on the problem of the

enclosure by private property of common natural resources and technologies, or the

socio-political marginalization rampant in the banlieues of France. In a word, they evoke

their daily relationship to the space of the city of Paris and the continuing struggle for

economic equality and justice not merely as actors, but as political and esthetic agents.

Indeed, Watkins has a curious way of “directing” his films that is, in final analysis, not a

direction of imperatives (i.e., “do this, show this emotion,” etc.) but of hypotheses,

49
With the exception, however, of characters such as Adolphe Thiers, whose speeches before the assembly
in Versailles are faithfully reproduced in the film.
 437

communication, and dialogue; his ‘direction’ is an empty, formal direction that consists

in letting actors, that is, those who are normally supposed to do nothing more than

“repeat” well rehearsed lines not only speak freely, but also write. One is almost tempted

to see in his oeuvre something like a cinematographic scandal.

And indeed, if there is such a scandal in Watkins’s Commune, it is not without a

transversal relationship to what Jacques Rancière has termed the “scandal of democracy”.

Indeed, the scandal at the revolutionary heart of the Commune is, in a Ranciérian

perspective, a purely democratic one – it is a scandal consisting in a posture of an-archy,

in the categorical refusal of any arkhè, or title (e.g., of birth, wealth, expertise, etc.), that

would seek to ground a conditional, contingent situation of inequality in a transhistorical,

natural (or transcendental) order of things. According to Rancière, whose theorization of

democracy one can locate in Watkins’s oeuvre, the scandal of the demos is contained in

the gesture of insisting on the radical equality of human beings, on their capacity to act,

speak, and decide their fates for themselves. Against situations of domination governed

by a “police logic” that sees the “truth” of the demos in the eternally unreasonable,

immature, inarticulate infans, Rancière argues that:

[l]e scandale de la démocratie (…) est de révéler que ce titre [à gouverner] ne peut
qu’être l’absence de titres[…La démocratie] signifie en dernier ressort le pouvoir de ceux
qui n’ont pas de raison naturelle de gouverner sur ceux qui n’ont pas de raison naturelle
d’être gouvernés (…). [C]’est le fondement du pouvoir de gouverner dans son absence de
fondement.50

Watkins is, ultimately, a supremely anti-Platonic metteur en scène, one whose

actors inhabit two roles simultaneously. Indeed, his actors are actors of both esthetic

representation and political representations, speech, and dialogue linking the struggles of

the past to the dilemmas of the present and the hopes for the future through the mediation

50
Jacques Rancière, op. cit., pp. 54-6.
 438

of a profoundly democratic esthetic method. As such, La Commune (Paris, 1871) seems

to put into praxis a tenet of what Rancière conceptualizes as “dissensus,” that is, rejection

of a partage du sensible based on the logic of the police, on an ever-increasing restriction

of the public sphere that relegates strictly political problems to the “neutral” domain of

private life, thereby seeking to diminish the number of “actors” who can appear to

(legitimately) speak in the name of a political “wrong”.51 Perhaps more than anything

else, what Watkins appears to be staging is the scandal of politics itself, that is, the

dismantling of the pastoral, expert power of the “director” and its replacement with the

disincorporated vide that is the paradoxical principle upon which democratic politics are

“grounded”.52

It should not really come as a surprise, then, that Watkins’s film doubles itself up

on a certain level. On the one hand, it offers a powerful, poetic re-writing of the events of

the Paris Commune, and on the other the film formally repeats, preserves, and prolongs

the democratic an-archy53 of the Commune itself, making the film something of a

performance in the linguistic sense of the term, an actual repetition of revolution for its

actors that it is impossible to dismiss as mere “play,” that has a successful “uptake” for

the actors involved. One scene, situated on the place de grève on the date of the official

proclamation of the Commune (03/28/1871), emblematizes this performative democracy

with a particularly poignant efficacy. In this scene, we witness the confrontation between

the owner of a pawn-shop (thus to be taken as the representative of a particularly odious

target of working-class ire), a véritable dame comme il faut, and her former maid, who

51
Ibid., pp. 62-3. See also, Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 15-17.
52
Ibid., pp. 39-41, 44.
53
We understand an-archy in the restricted sense of a regime of politics deprived of “titles,” or principles of
organization based on naturalized hierarchies of inequality.
 439

left the sphere of domestic servitude for the “disorder of the streets” on the 18th of March.

The former reproaches her ex-servant for getting mixed up in politics, affirming the utter

folly of the Commune in the following terms: “Mais il y a toujours eu des riches et des

pauvres – c’est dans l’ordre des choses.” Of course, in such a réplique striving to offer

itself up as without appeal,54 it is quite easy to hear an echo of what Rancière calls the

logic of the police, that is, an argument advanced on the basis of a pre-supposition of

inequality in Nature, history, and/or metaphysics.

Yet the moment the working-class character to whom this argument in favor of

consensus is made speaks back, it is to offer up a properly dissensual utterance, one that

invalidates the logic of naturalized domination: “plus maintenant,” she responds, “à partir

d’aujourd’hui, ça change.” And in that moment, as spectators, we are at the heart of a

kind of revolutionary hic et nunc, immersed in a temporality that is less governed by an

irresistible, totalizing telos of the present,55 than it is shot-through with miniscule acts of

discursive resistance and oppositional speech that nevertheless symbolically throw down

a given “order of things”. It is not, in other words, a film that we are watching, but a

politics into which we are drawn, a story from the past in which we too may become

players caught in the act of envisaging not a perfect future, but a radically different one in

the present.56

54
A word should be added concerning the actors: not only were they allowed to write their own lines, but
choose their roles according to their ideological affiliation. The actress in question, for instance, self-
identifies later in the film as very conservative, and as a resident of the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
55
The present in question is a time of inequality, the present of capital, in which, as one critic sardonically
put it recently, the future is always the present, “with more options” (Flaubert once similarly opined that if
one wishes to know what the future will look like it suffices to seek out the worst aspects of the present).
Cited in Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others (London:
Verso, 2003) p. 34.
56
Towards the end of the film, Watkins seems to push the temporal blurring of the past and present to a
limit, inserting a “carton”. It is singularly difficult to ascertain the identity of the interlocutor of this
“carton,” but one must presuppose that its addressee can only be the viewer of the film itself. This final
 440

IV. Conclusion(s): Encountering Literary Politics and the Legacy of the

Commune

If it’s not entirely inappropriate to say that the present work has in some sense

“hit a wall,” for there is perhaps something always a little bit melancholic and exhausting

to the act of concluding a work that has, if anything, perhaps left us with more questions

than we initially set out with,57 we can take some small measure of comfort in the fact

that this wall is the Mur des Fédérés.

The Mur des Fédérés can be found at the north-east angle of the Père Lachaise

cemetery, just across from the final resting place of Jean-Baptiste Clément (of “Le temps

“carton” does not contain any information, it no longer poses itself as an authoritative intervention of
History, but rather poses a question: “Avez-vous eu le temps de vous organizer depuis la dernière fois
qu’on s’est vu?” The suggestion in this interrogation, to say nothing of this reversal of specular relations, is,
of course, that the film has been an address to the spectator all along on a pied d’égalité, as an incitement to
political organization in the present. The eu-chrony of the present slips into a revolutionary “maintenant”
where after all, it’s not impossible to imagine that “ça [peut] change[r]” as the laundress put it, and the
discursive space separating the film from the spectator collapses into a kind of eu-topic space, the space of
cinema.
57
Thus, I’d like to reserve for another discussion, in another time and place, the question, which is not
entirely unrelated to Watkins’s critique of the “monoform,” of the media’s collusion in the discursive
production what Giorgio Agamben has termed homo sacer during the semaine sanglante. I’d insist, simply,
that such a figure does not emerge ex nihilo out of an unforeseeable catastrophe of history, but is a certain
rule (or, as he calls it, a paradigm, a nomos) of power as it functions within the double fields of biopolitics,
the politicization of life, and the “state of exception”. The creation of a series of homines sacri is not only a
problem of sovereignty, not only a problem of a biopolitical governmentality, but of complicity of the
governed as well. The suspension of the law against killing, the production of a subject who is subjected to
the ‘law’ of impune occidi depends, to a degree that is disconcerting to consider, on a discursive dispositive
that is apt to “sacralize” those it considers as the enemies of the “State,” “Nation,” and/or “Race”. Such a
phenomenon clearly occurred in the spring and summer of 1871, when the Commune was crushed with a
brutality that would be unmatched before the cataclysmic rise of fascism in the 1930s. Consider, for
instance, that descriptions of the Commune, and of communards, aimed not solely, or even principally, at
de-politicizing the Parisian revolution, but of casting the revolutionaries outside of the recognizable frontier
of shared humanity. Their status was not even monstrous (i.e., a limit, but one within the fold of the
human), but rather, as Alexandre Dumas fils, Ernest Feydeau, Maxime du Camp, Hippolyte Taine, and
countless others affirmed, animal, zoe: “nous ne dirons rien de leurs femelles par respect pour les femmes à
qui elles ressemblent – quand elles sont mortes” (Dumas fils); “[La Commune] n’est plus la barbarie qui
nous menace (…), c’est la bestialité pure et simple” (E. Feydeau); “[L]a politique n’y fut pour rien” (du
Camp); “(…) des soldats à muffle de tigre (…) des fronts de taureaux, des profils de porcs, de boucs, de
béliers, des faces barbares de singes” (Taine). Cited in Paul Lidksy, op. cit., pp. 49, 64, 154. Robert Tombs,
for example, has demonstrated in his study of the Commune that soldiers in the Versaillais army were
exposed to such rhetoric on a near-daily basis during between April and May 1871 in journals such as Le
Gaulois and Le Figaro. Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris 1871 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981).
 441

des cerises” fame), Le Colonel Fabien, and several monuments to the French resistance

and to the memory of French citizens deported to Nazi death-camps. If one weren’t in

fact looking for it, one might pass entirely by this curious site that is somewhere between

boundary and memory, or perhaps at the boundary of the cultural memory of the Third

Republic (by a somewhat cruelly appropriate irony of history, Adolphe Thiers is buried

nearby, a bit closer to the wall where the Commune was buried than is Jules Vallès, for

example). At once poignant and anodyne, metaphor and material, the wall combines in an

uneasy relationship the poorly reconciled (and perhaps irreconcilable) tension between

memory and forgetting.58 Indeed, this wall circumscribes a mythic lieu de mémoire that at

once aims at being universal and inevitably introduces the division of civil war and of

politics within the history of the French Republic. It is perhaps historically fitting, if not a

little ironic, that this counter-site of memory for the left is to be found in Père Lachaise

cemetery, a site which was itself created to empty the city of Paris of its dead, to displace

their troubling presence to an ex-centric site where, along with “death, detritus, drink,

crime, prostitution, (…) even labor itself [could be] quite simply (…) rendered

invisible.”59 It is, in other words, a surprisingly adequate symbol for the event it

58
Thus the wall’s official historian in Nora’s Les Lieux de Mémoire, Madeleine Rebérioux, concludes her
rich and insightful study of the wall’s intensely contested history by arguing that the declaration of the wall
as an official lieu d’histoire is an ambivalent one (it had long been, of course, a site of counter-
history/memory for decades, one that was kept under strict surveillance by the police from the 1880s up to
the popular front era, when commemorations at the wall in the month of May drew crowds numbering in
the tens of thousands): “not necessarily a sign of death, but not necessarily a sign of life either.” Madeleine
Rebérioux, “Le mur des fédérés: Rouge, ‘sang craché’,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. I, Pierre Nora, ed.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 649.
59
Richard E.D. Burton, Blood in the City, op. cit., p. 132. Burton recalls that Père Lachaise, which was first
opened to the dead as a kind of inverted image of the city of the living (with the rich in perpetual
concession and the poor buried atop one another in mass graves) in 1804, was part of a larger, lateral push
to hygienize, rationalize, and discipline the space of the city, the ultimate logic of which is to be found in
the massive urban renewal projects of Haussmann which, as we know, emptied the city of its classes
dangereuses. From 1765 to 1804, then, most of the city’s urban graveyards were transported to the
periphery of the city, commonly to former quarry sites such as could be found in Montmartre, Claimart,
 442

commemorates – an event that passed through numerous occultations, negotiations,

episodes of repression, and literary, historical, imaginary resurrections before entering,

somewhat awkwardly, into the history of the nineteenth century, and indeed of the French

Republic.

In the above pages, we have not only attempted to identify the contours of the

return of the Commune today, we have tried to answer the question: “what elements in

society, history, and politics have (over)determined this return?” Why, at the dawn of the

twenty-first century, in the self-proclaimed era of the end of ideology, and perhaps of

politics, did the Commune return as a kind of analytical and evenemential grid for

thinking through the problems of democracy, equality, and politics? To answer this

question, a final word about “literary politics” is necessary.

First and foremost, this concept refers to a practice of reading. By that, I simply

mean that the conceptual category of literary politics seems clearly to be a productive

way of reading Rimbaud’s verse production from 1870-71 (if not in general), Vallès’s

novels, as well as many post-Commune authors such as Victor Hugo, Maxime du Camp,

and Émile Zola, or even visual artists such as Gustave Courbet and Gustave Caillebotte.

Rather than a universalizable method for reading literary texts, literary politics may be

more a certain condition for reading literature with history than a normative proposition

about literature as such (though I do reserve the possibility that it may be a kind of

universal property of texts).

Literary politics, then, is simply a reflection on writing as a kind of social

phenomenon entailing the following: “literature” does things. Given that texts are socio-

Montparnasse, and Vaugirard. See also, Philippe Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp.
184-266.
 443

historical objects produced by social beings involved in class relations, one thing

literature can do is ratify a world in which class relations and antagonisms are

normalized, naturalized, and, in a word, legitimized (personally, I don’t think most good

literature does this, though there’s always le cas Zola). Literary politics can put into

representation a world where everything and body is in its place, and then virtually play-

out any disruption of this natural order as inevitably resulting in a self-destructive

catastrophe for the body, for the nation, for civilization, etc. (one might indeed take

Zola’s Débâcle as an emblem of this sort of literary politics).

Yet “literature” can just as well do the opposite as literature. The way poems and

novels disfigure poetic form, valorize certain forms of speech, or treat subjects such as

class, gender, and sexual difference with an ironic distance are also clearly ways in which

they strategically situate themselves with respect to the social phenomena, dominant

discourses, and political conflicts that literature necessarily, actively grapples with, even

if it does so asymmetrically.

Literary politics is a term I have used, therefore, to underscore the fact that we

cannot easily divorce literary form from political performance in some cases.

If we take, for instance, simply the sonnets by Rimbaud we considered in this

dissertation, we clearly see that formal subversions of syntactical, metric, and strophic

limits are much more than empty esthetic games. To the contrary, they are an integral

part of what we more commonly call the text’s meaning: that is, the text’s relation to

itself, its relation to a body of intertexts from which it is setting itself apart through its

formal esthetic and poetic subversions (in the case of Rimbaud, the autotelic, apolitical
 444

“movement” of Parnasse), and, finally, its relation to its own historical and social

situation, or context.

Now, if we focus on one element, say a poem’s political semantics, at the expense

of the other, say, a curious accumulation of internal and external enjambment, we simply

will not realize that the esthetic subversion of the sonnet constitutes a cortical aspect of

the political critique silently running through the entire text (i.e., the nightmare of

violence upon which, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, our monuments of culture are

founded). If, inversely, we focus solely on the formal aspect of the text, the non-semantic,

combinatory mechanisms by which it produces meanings without taking into account the

text’s context (i.e., what kinds of subjects were legitimately perceived as being

appropriate material for a sonnet, or what the cultural and political valence of a bar was

for the working classes), then “Au Cabaret-vert” can look like a pretty underwhelming

poem indeed, if not a “failure” of the poetic verb itself.

Thus, literary politics is a term, a concept, and a practice I have deployed in this

dissertation to describe a two-fold operation of esthetic and political dislocation of a

given “order of things” that otherwise passes for unproblematic, grounded, stable, in a

word, irresistibly normal. In its conceptual iteration, I have drawn upon Ross Chambers’s

work on oppositionality (cf., infra) and Jacques Rancière’s theorization of “literarity” for

its elaboration.60 Rancière defines literarity as the free circulation of language addressing

itself potentially to any one, and particularly to those who ought to be working rather than

reading and/or thinking. Literarity, and this is where it comes closest to democracy for

60
See especially, La chair des mots: politiques de l’écriture (Paris: Galilée, 1998) and the insightful
interviews collected in Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués: entretiens (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2009).
 445

Rancière, means a régime de parole sans scène légitime, where anyone and anything can

be the subject of a story, a poem, of history.

The second sense in which I understand literary politics is as a way of signposting

a text’s relationship to the contradictions of its historical, political, and ideological

context that owes much to the Marxist hermeneutics of sociocriticism. Art, poetry,

literature, discourse, cannot be simply reduced to an object that passively reflects the

dominant ideology, or political discourse, of its day. I do not think, nor would I argue, in

other words, that “literature,” be it a poem or any thing else, merely conceals an

ideological “truth” that we can extract, unfold, and then point to as the essence of

“literature”. To be perfectly frank, I am not entirely certain, nor am I concerned with

ascertaining whether or not literature has an “essence,” be it material, transcendental, or

otherwise (though if I were pressed, I would ultimately affirm that literature is a social

praxis rather than an ontology – what it does is more important to my mind than what it

is).

Hence, my argument about literary politics is not that literature is nothing but

politics by other means. One can of course read Rimbaud, Vallès, or any other text for

that matter in a purely esthetic manner and, the vast hermeneutic circle and the legitimate

plurality of readings being what they are, no one will hold it against the reader (and

rightly so). Rather, what I understand by literary politics in the specific instance of

Rimbaud’s verse poetry from 1870-71, Vallès’s novels from the late 1870s early 1880s,

and the para-literary re-writings of the Commune from the 2000s is that we can locate in

these literary texts a complicated relationship to/with history, to political and social

struggles that is a linguistic relationship, one that, using the common material of language
 446

in a literary form, draws our attention to a knot of historical, political, and indeed literary

problems.

Rimbaud does not invent the sonnet, obviously. However he does use this “high”

literary form to democratic ends in “Au Cabaret-vert,” staging a paradoxically heroic

version of the everyday and of being together, of being-in-common, that celebrates the

suspension of the disciplinary space-time of capital at a crucial pre-Commune moment in

French literature and history. In “Le Dormeur du Val,” he submits the formal and

rhetorical coherence of the sonnet to an estrangement that problematizes the politically

reactionary discourse of nationalism prevalent in France during the Franco-Prussian war.

Similarly a “sonnet” like “Paris,” crucially written in a collaborative framework that on

its own draws our theoretical attention to the fact that writing poetry is also a social,

collective act, or a novel like L’Insurgé, can be used to preserve simultaneously the

memory and the ideals of an event that has been violently repressed. Literary politics can,

in other words, be a form of symbolic resistance that gives formal existence (and form

isn’t nothing),61 visibility, audibility, and intelligibility to a “wrong,” that is, a situation of

exclusion, domination, or violence at the base of a historical, social configuration that

many would rather just consign to oblivion, invisibility, normalcy, or simply silence, to a

kind of structural and evenemential infantia.

Rimbaud and Vallès’s literary politics accomplish, to my mind, at least three

goals: first, they contest and destabilize the figure of the infans by drawing attention to its

contingent, class-bound “constructedness”; second, they produce alternate representations

61
On the contrary, form, as in, “formal bourgeois rights,” represents a crucial point of departure for
political subjectivation, provided that they are taken as truly universal. Jacques Rancière insists on this
point in a number of his works, especially in Aux bords du politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2004) and first in his
important study of the worker-poets movement, La nuit des prolétaires: archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris:
Hachette, 2005).
 447

of the infans, of those subjects who normally “don’t count” within literary form, and

indeed I think they allow for something like the demos, the subject of politics to emerge,

or re-emerge, in their works; finally, it’s clear to me that a crucial component of their

literary politics consists in using the space of literature to preserve the memory and ethos

of the Paris Commune in the early Third Republic, at a moment, as I’ve suggested in my

dissertation, when it was deeply taboo and difficult, if not in some instances illegal, to do

so. On the one hand, this study has been concerned with how normative representations

of the marginalized circulated in nineteenth-century literary, and other, texts are

generated and stabilized; but on the other hand, it has been deeply concerned with the

possibility of challenging the authority and legitimacy of such representations.

Ultimately, I think the lesson of Rimbaud, Vallès, and the legacy of the Commune

is that, improbable or unsuccessful as it may ultimately be, there is always the possibility

for the conversion of a naturalized situation of domination into a scene of political

contest, a scene that I think is dramatically emblematized at the end of the nineteenth

century by the Paris Commune itself. In the final chapter of this work, we turned to what

I hope is the legacy of this event.

A few years ago, as I was doing research for this study, I was struck by what I

have called the return of the Commune as a point of reference for thinking about models

of community and collective responses to the crises of capitalism that we are all so

familiar with in the United States and Europe since the fall of 2008. Perhaps for the left

the Commune admittedly never went anywhere, but it was all the same intriguing to see it

make its way into a massively popular bande dessinée by Jacques Tardi and (slightly less

surprising) into a cult film by Peter Watkins, whose democratic esthetics and ethos I have
 448

attempted to conceptualize in the final chapter of the dissertation as a cinematic an-archy

(playing with Rancière’s notion of the arkhè and of democracy as a mode of political

subjectivation founded on the absence of titles or natural foundations).

Perhaps the most important legacy of the Paris Commune, and indeed the literary

works of Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Vallès, is to help us see that it is not impossible to

change the way we apprehend the possible and the impossible in the world we live in,

and that, indeed, one place where such epistemological and ethical (in the sense of

engaging us as subjects) shifts occur or are produced is indeed in “literature”. In times

such as ours, which are frankly depressingly similar in some senses to the world in which

Rimbaud and Vallès lived and wrote, it may be more important than ever to dramatically

re-think, re-theorize, and re-evaluate the problems of the commons, which include

problems touching on democracy, equality, and ultimately justice – problems, or ideals,

that were incidentally at the heart of the Commune. Now, a poem, a novel, a bande

dessinée or a film may not transform the world (would that it were so). But what they can

do is affect the interpretations we have available for understanding our world; they can

even reorganize our desires for the kind of world we’d like to see and live in.

Why, then, do these works, and the Commune with them, return today? As final

hypothesis, let us say that it is perhaps precisely in such a post-political, post-ideological

era of consensus interspersed with a seemingly endless series of nightmare crises

(ecological, political, economic, etc.) that invariable seem to serve as so many pretexts

for further restricting the public sphere, to say nothing of further consolidating class

power and economic inequalities, that our need for an event like the Commune, which

was one way of imagining an alternative to the violence of capitalism, is greatest. In such
 449

conditions, the marginalization of dissensus, of the political itself, can only effectuate

something akin to a return of the repressed with a vengeance. Today, the memory, event,

and ideal of the Commune appears lodged at the very heart of a desire for a thinking

about the commons, a desire for collective, egalitarian solutions for the share of natural

resources and wealth, if not a more general sense that the path of increasingly sclerotic

socio-economic inequality and crises in democracy and capitalism is one which we must

quit or change in some meaningful, if difficult at times to envisage, way. As such, the

Commune haunts our present, and our readings of past and à-venir, as a kind of point de

repère. It appears as, to paraphrase Kafka, an event that allows us to believe all the same

in progress even if it seems as though precious little progress has been made.62 But in

what sense do the works of Jacques Tardi, Peter Watkins, or, for that matter, Arthur

Rimbaud and Jules Vallès respond to, or indeed solicit, this desire for a more democratic

organization of the social and the common that the Paris Commune represented and

continues to linger as a kind of horizon?

To this question, we can but offer a tentative response inspired by Ross

Chambers’s theoretical work on oppositionality and literature. To wit, the mere encounter

with these texts, images, stories, and histories represents as such the debuts of the kind of

change that we seek in the world around us. Rimbaud’s early verse poems, Vallès’s

novels, Tardi’s B.D. and Watkins’s film all in essence esthetically enact, perform, and

create the kind of democratic politics that forms the content and ethos of their works. For

one of the methodological claims that I have staked out is that the early works of Arthur

Rimbaud, the prose of Jules Vallès, that is, the only two communard writers to have made

it into the French ‘canon’, need to be read in the light of their historical and political
62
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991), p. 28
 450

context, as texts that collaborate in the event of the Commune as it took place and, later,

as texts that contributed to not only preserving the memory of this event as it increasingly

came to be repressed, but also to prolonging its ideals. Vallès and Rimbaud’s works

represent, in sum, the articulation of a “wrong,” understood as a constitutive fault-line of

injustice within the social edifice, at the moment of the Commune. What’s more, in the

aftermath of the semaine sanglante, texts such as “Paris,” or L’Enfant might be seen as

counter-historical narratives honoring the nameless, voiceless thousands that died in the

name of an Idea(l) that continues to haunt our own present, as the works of Tardi and

Peter Watkins attest.

In a sense, what we detect in the texts with which we have engaged and grappled

in these pages, is the Commune’s messianic aspect.63 For, the straight-gate that the

“messiah” might at any moment walk through is perhaps in some sense nothing more

than our capacity to draw anachronistic connections to past aspirations, struggles, and

revolutions. The “Event,” or indeed the “messianism” of the Commune is paradoxically

neither anthroprocentic nor, really, evenemential in the historicist sense of a punctual

event that had a “rational” genealogy that can be traced, explained, whose defeat is

somehow always already a foregone conclusion. Rather, it may be best thought of as a

memory – a memory of past suffering that throws light on, that illuminates, the politics

and meaning of present suffering and injustice. It is precisely such memories, breaking up

the sedate, amnesiac continuity of the present, that one finds bursting forth in the works

of Rimbaud and Vallès from the time of the Commune, and which render their oeuvres

perhaps more important to us now than ever before.

63
Ibid., pp. 260-264. See Terry Eagleton’s insightful commentary on this rather complex concept in Walter
Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), especially pp. 43-79.
 451

Encounters with these texts, politics, and memories, which cannot be un-

encountered, constitute in their own way, perhaps minute but indubitably significant,

disruptions in the partage du sensible, a becoming-unfamiliar of the hegemonic:

Not radical (…) or immediate change; only local and scattered, that might one day take
collective shape and work socially significant transformations. [The] model for such
change is the phenomenon that occurs when one reads a book (…) and is ‘influenced,’
that is, changed by it (…); reading is the name of the practice that has the power of
producing shifts in desire – […the desire] that produces reality itself. […Reading]
consists in making use of dominant structures for ‘other’ purposes.64

In our view, each one of the texts that we have encountered in the course of this

work represents just such an “alternative use of dominant structures”. When we re-read

Vallès or Rimbaud, or Victor Hugo or Louise Michel for that matter, we create links, we

forge a text between the present and the past, between the text from the past and our

context, the con-text that we, as readers, perhaps always already forge. When we view

Peter Watkins’s constitutively heterogeneous, democratic film, or Tardi’s B.D. which, far

from contenting itself with a simple mise-en-texte/images of the past, strains and strives

to continue the work of the past through a work on the texts of the past, we are in some

undeniable sense encountering the ethos at the heart of the Commune, which is to say that

the gap between the ideals of the past and what is possible in the present is perhaps never

so large as we might take it to be.

Personally, I’m tempted to end this work on the figure of the antanaclasis, that is,

a figure playing on the polysemantic possibilities of a verb or a noun (the most well-

known example is Pascal’s “Le coeur a ses raisons…”). Let us take the French verb,

“regarder”. Given the grammatical and conceptual ambivalence surrounding the status of

the complement of the verb, that is, depending on whether or not the complement is the

64
Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. xi-xii.
 452

object being gazed at (e.g., “nous regardons le film”), or is the subject including us in the

field of its historical, ethical, or political gaze (e.g., “ça nous regarde”), what we perhaps

encounter, and cannot un-encounter, in these texts is the fact that the Commune continues

to nous regarder. The Commune continues to gaze at, to concern us. Indeed, in an era

where what one urban geographer has called our “planet of slums”65 appears desperate

for some alternative, and where, as David Harvey affirms, the ranks of the global

proletariat have never been more swelled;66 in an era where staking out a non-capitalist

relationship to nature has never been more imperative; and, finally, in an era where the

divide between the richest and the poorest in the first world as in the third has never been

more aggravated since the time of the Commune67 we can truly say la Commune nous

regarde. The Paris Commune, such as it is imagined, desired, written, and certainly in

some sense mourned in the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Vallès, Peter Watkins, and

Jacques Tardi continues to concern us as a (possible) practice of equality, a (possibly)

democratic reconfiguration of the common. It continues to regard us, to change us. With

65
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
66
Cited in, Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011),
p. 170.
67
Easily available socio-economic and geographic statistics only serve to make this case more compelling.
In 1870, for instance, the 20th percentile of richest Europeans earned on average 7 times the amount the
poorest worker earned, and the richest 10 percent (in France) had access to approximately 80 percent of all
available wealth. Today, in the United States, the average income disparity between a CEO and a worker
can reach as high as 185 percent, the richest nations on the planet accumulated (in 2007) 86 percent of all
available wealth, and, in the United States since the near-total collapse of finance capital in 2008 (saved
from the brink of extinction by a transfer of the financial crisis from the private to the public sector), wealth
distribution was so heavily skewed to favor the already rich that the 20th richest percent of Americans had
acces to 85 percent of all available wealth in the United States (amongst these same statistics, we see an
even more startling figure: in terms of income, 25 percent of all available income goes to 1 percent of the
population in the United States – this same single percent, that is 3,000,000 people, had 40 percent of all
available wealth). See, David Kay Johnston, “The Gap Betweent he Rich and Poor Grows in the United
States,” The International Herald Tribune, 29/03/2007; Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton, “Building a
Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” forthcoming in Perspectives on Psychological Science,
available on-line at, http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf, last
accessed 04/15/2011. See also, Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, “It’s the Inequality, Stupid!,” Mother Jones
(March-April), http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph, last
accessed 04/15/2011.
 453

each encounter, it looms like a coming germinal, it continues its in-finite work of

memory for the foreseeable future.

At the risk of concluding somewhat dubiously from atop a soap-box, I would like

to make one last remark on the following, admittedly very contemporary, example that

has nothing to do with literature directly but much to do with the problematic at the heart

of this dissertation. The uprisings that took place in both the Middle East and the

American mid-west seemed a little too timely, a little too true to be good, as I was writing

the final pages of this work. In Madison, WI, for instance, ordinary people engaged in the

rather extraordinary act of political subjectivation were told to act like “adults,” when

they were not being described as a smelly rabble of idiots making a bothersome racket by

one of their elected representatives; they were told to stop behaving like spoiled children

and accept the destitution of their political rights, and the dismantling of institutions of

direct democracy, as “inevitable” in the face of a financial crisis that, of course, had

nothing to do with politics. In other words, these people were, for a moment at least, le

peuple, they were both infans and demos.68 In such a situation, that is, in our current

context, I think the very least we might say is that the social, symbolic, and political

problems and questions figured by the infans and the demos, problems and questions with

which Rimbaud and Vallès engaged in their literary works, are still very much with us

today, making their works not only important ones to continue to interpret, but possible

grids for analyzing, interpreting, and re-imagining the text of our own present. They are,

in other words, our contemporaries, and the Paris Commune – as an event, ideal,

68
It was striking, too, how these people coming together to interrupt the smooth consensual process of
democracy were rightly, if ironically, always represented as both supplementary (i.e., as a count that ought
not be counted as such) and as a loud minority on the side of phônè.
 454

memory, or narrative – continues to be more contemporary (in May of 2011) than at any

point since May of 1871.

 455

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