Arthur Rimbaud : The Mystic Way
Dernière mise à jour : 8 avr. 2023
Arthur Rimbaud ; La Table, Henri Fantin-Latour (detail)
(Paris, Musée D'Orsay © Getty / DeAgostini)
Extracts of :
Arthur Rimbaud and the Mystic Way
by Dana Wilde
(...) "To explain why Rimbaud's poetry is not simply radical poetic experimentation, but the record of a mystic or contemplative life, Evelyn Underhill's description of the five stages of mystic experience, and some specific terminology of contemplative poetry developed by Arthur Clements in Poetry of Contemplation, provide a framework.
While Starkie, Gwendolyn Bays and others speak specifically of Rimbaud's use of alchemical and occult ideas in his poetry, the aim of this essay is to make the mystical, or contemplative elements of Rimbaud's life and poetry clear. Rimbaud's biography really is important in this context because not only is his poetry childhood itself, but it conveys in the purest possible terms Rimbaud's spiritual life between 1871 and 1873. His poetry and his life seem inextricable from each other.
Underhill's overview of the mystic way provides a key to understanding the transcendental process which most mystics, and Rimbaud, follow in their lives and describe in their writings. In her classic study Mysticism, Underhill explains the five stages in the mystic's progress toward God:
l) Awakening or Conversion
2) Purgation
3) Illumination
4) Purification or the Dark Night of the Soul
5) Union
Rimbaud proceeded through the first four of these stages and broke off before attaining actual contemplative "union." The whole process is tied in complicated ways to his writing: when he ceases writing, he ceases his intense drive toward God, as shown at the end of Une Saison en enfer, to be discussed in more detail later.
Conversion
Underhill describes the first stage, Conversion, as "a sharp and sudden break with the old and obvious way of seeing things". Conversion is a reaction of the natural self, as opposed to the social or normal self, to an "uprush of new truth". In Rimbaud's case, conversion coincides with adolescence, when, having been the prize student, he at the age of fifteen drops out of school and focuses attention on two things: poetry, and escaping from his domineering mother. It is not clear that Rimbaud's conversion involved a vision or a transcendent experience; probably it did not.
But it did involve a personal awakening to the strictures of both personal and social life, strictures which he found intolerable and set out to change. His personal and social life was dominated by his mother and the church, and as his poetry progressed rapidly out of an imitative stage, he began to write more original poems critical of the church and religion generally.
(...)
This is no conventional awakening, and there is no reason to think at this point that it has anything to do with mystical or contemplative problems at all. Rimbaud exhibits typical adolescent rebellion. but unlike most boys his age, acts it out in poetry. With Rimbaud the rebellion is complicated because at this early age he is already aware of his own opposition to the oppressive moral and social climate of his culture, a climate other writers, such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Villiers and Nietzsche, would also react to strongly.
With Rimbaud the reaction is more violent and intense. Viewing the church - the traditional moral and spiritual center of society-as ugly (and probably inimical to spiritual matters) and as the upholder of conventional morality, his impulse is to reject and even to foul it. Significantly, his inner rejection of the church and Christ is also a poetic act. Even this early, poetry is part of the process of his life and not an ornament or career. His natural adolescent awakening is instantly elevated to an intense personal struggle against everything he knows, which is his "break with the old obvious way of seeing things."
Purgation
Underhill calls the second stage of the mystic way Purgation, and we can see that Rimbaud engages in a spiritual purgation of his own devising which is unlike Underhill's descriptions in form, but has exactly the same purpose. She states that Purgation involves "the drastic turning of the self from the unreal to the real life" ; it is the stripping away of what needs to be removed and the cleansing of what will remain. This is normally accomplished in two ways, she says: through "Detachment," which employs poverty, and through "Mortification", which