A mystery in the history of French poetry
It is said that in 1871, a 17-year-old young man from the provinces went to Paris. His name was Arthur Rimbaud. In 2021, as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, it seems to forget the relationship between the Paris Commune and poetry. "If Rimbaud is truly admirable, it's not because he fell silent but because he made a sound. ...... One should remember the very simple fact that Rimbaud came to Paris in 1871, and naturally he joined the Army of the Commune..." This is what the great French poet of the 20th century, Louis Aragon, wrote in his 1935 article. Aragon even determined that "in the barracks of the Water Palace, the young Rimbaud had not yet questioned the purpose of writing and singing", and that he had written and sung not of anything else, but of "the hands of working women", a pair of hands that were sun and rain and now took up the weapons of the riot. This refers to Rimbaud's The Hand of Jeanne-Marie:
……
They are not the hands of cousins,
It's the hand of a working woman with a brain door,
Under the drunken tarmac sun,
They burned, in the forest that emitted the stench of the workshop.
They are getting paler, but extraordinary,
Under the sun of love,
On the bronze of the machine gun,
Revolted Paris!
Aragon's words are convincing, and as evidenced by this series of "Paris war songs" by young poets, we can simply "brain up" the scene of Rimbaud and the "poet Of the First International, Boudier", the great painter Courbet, chairman of the Fine Arts Committee of the Paris Commune, which is fascinating to think. But in fact, the end of Rambo's actions in the spring of 1871, especially whether he personally went to Paris to participate in the Commune Uprising, is still a mystery in the history of French poetry.
According to the "biography and information" published in the "Seven Stars Poetry Library" edition of Rimbaud's Complete Works, Rimbaud may have gone to Paris in mid-April and lived in the Paris Commune for several days, but this widely circulated hypothesis could not be fully "confirmed" (another unknown young poet, who had been in Paris, was Lautreamont, who had died during the Siege of Paris in the German-French War the previous year, and who was rediscovered decades later, also "canonized" by the Surrealists). After all, the Paris Commune is not a lyric poem, and even as the English critic Eagleton suggests, it is not a poetic carnival of blood and wine. It is the unprecedented modern regime and social form of the working people in history, it is the struggle and creation of 72 days and nights, it is the heroic death of about twenty-five thousand people. Why, then, have critics been obsessed with whether Rimbaud sang in the "Barracks of the Water Palace", whether he stood shoulder to shoulder with the "Parisian workers", and whether he was with socialist fighters like Bauddière? The key question is: How did poetry change in the Paris Commune? What is the connection between the Paris Commune and poetry? If, according to the Second International theoretician Merlin, the Paris Commune is the "touchstone" of all "revolutionary strategy and tactics", is poetry also part of this experiment of "strategy and tactics"?
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), a famous French poet of the 19th century, a representative of Symbolist poetry, and the originator of Surrealist poetry. He called himself a "psychic" and was called a "man of the wind". Representative works include the poems "Drunken Boat", "Vowels", the prose poems "A Season of Hell", "The Collection of Spiritual Lights" and so on.
Poetic language is like a barricade
In this regard, the Book of the Paris Commune and Rimbaud by the American left-wing scholar Kristen Ross has become a model of the intertwining of literary studies and social history. She began by saying that everyone had wasted "too much ink" on Rimbaud's whereabouts, but what really mattered was whether Rimbaud, with the slogan "Change Of Life", could represent a change in poetic language commensurate with the Uprising of the Paris Commune? Rimbaud wrote in May 1871: "The invention of the unknown requires new forms". He even drafted a "communist charter" in the summer, but unfortunately it was overdue. But according to his friends, Rimbaud proposed the abolition of representative government and put everything in a referendum (see Ross 21). Ross and Aragon had very different views, arguing that Rimbaud fell silent in 1875, the "post-commune", ending his career in poetry writing, but he had long reflected on "the use of writing and singing". It was in 1871 that Rimbaud proposed "I want to be a worker". Writing, like the work of the "Parisian workers", is the same work, which has no privileges or superiority, but is equal to and reflects each other with the labor of all walks of life. Meanwhile, "so many workers are dying!" So we read in Carnival of Paris or the Population Boom in Paris:
Your mission is established, death groans, chosen cities!
With a heavy brass trumpet pile up a sharp wail in the heart.
The psalmist will grasp the sobs of the lowly,
The hatred of the slaves, the voices of the cursed;
(Translated by Wang Yipei)
Poetry as a work was constantly liberated from cultural privilege and social isolation, which led to the real "presence" of Rimbaud in the Paris Commune. Ross gives a series of poetic metaphors and a mixture of uprising slogans, workers' slang, and political cartoons. For example, the relationship between the fanatical language rapids in Rimbaud's famous "Drunken Boat" and the failure of the Paris Commune has always been intriguing, and one of the images is "vin bleu", which is also intoxicating and counts as evidence of bold surreal metaphors. According to the research, in fact, "blue wine" does refer to, the cheap red wine on the 19th century song and dance performance field, sprinkled on the tablecloth can not be washed off, it leaves blue stains, so the bottom people - that is, the consumers of this wine - called "blue wine".
In addition, the phrase "green lips" in the "Color Atlas" is also an example of an "absolute metaphor", but it actually comes from the Parisian worker language, which refers to the sick face of a prostitute when she rises in the morning, and also appears in the commune slogan poems of other poets. As for the Paris Battle Song, the poem of the Commune that "breaks down the barrier between the high arts and reportage" (Ross 139 p. 139), it is also connected with the rhythm of the song to connect many of the commune slogans, posters and satirical cartoon titles. Among them, Rimbaud satirized Thiers and other leaders of the Versailles reactionary government as "Eros, the god of love", and at that time, the commune people had already played this "harmonic stem", because "des Eros" was pronounced continuously, and "a bunch of zeros" was pronounced the same, and "zero" in the workers' slang referred to the incompetent and uncertain. In a series of cartoons, Thiers and others are portrayed as bloated and incompetent hollow people, i.e. a bunch of "zeros", also looking to the "Rape Republic". Soon after, the pile of "zeros" was the executioners who slaughtered the workers.
As Eagleton summed it up, such poetic language is like a barricade, piled up with a variety of miscellaneous objects from the city. The improvised work aesthetic of poetry corresponds to the urban spatial politics of barricades. In Paris, the capital of modernity, the opposite of the barricades are monuments. The barricades are messy and horizontal, and the monuments are elaborately constructed and erected. The opposite of Rimbaud's poetic work is the canon of form, pure poetry. Sartre said that Rimbaud's metaphor is explosive, an expanded, multiplicity of unity, while baudelaire and Marami's metaphor are condensed and condensed, which can also be said to be the difference between barricades and monuments in poetry.
The members of the commune were busy demolishing monuments that reflected the glory of the French Empire. It is said that when the Monument of Vendôme fell, the dust was flying, and a group of rats had already run out of the decaying material of the monument! But is it strategically and tactically appropriate to focus on this in the urgent moment of the revolution? Since Marx and Engels, there has been no shortage of criticisms: the Paris Commune was anxious to change the face of the capital, but did not distract itself from destroying the Bank of France, making a "serious political mistake"! But just as urban symbols and political economy are as important, just as Rimbaud wants to break the dominance of the poetic canon, so the commune wants to break the dominance of the classical monuments over urban space. On the contrary, the commune had proposed the project of "Monument to the Cursed" in the form of a printed billboard, on which the "history of hell" of the Second Empire would be completely covered, and even the architect of the transformation of Paris, Haussmann, was also on the list, which can be described as a kind of reverse monument.
Of course, during the days of the reactionary government sieges and sieges, the Commune created new social spaces (including Rimbaud's poetry), but they were ultimately subject to the spatial structure of the greatest bourgeois metropolis of the 19th century. The workers were no longer facing Paris, where there had been many French revolutions since the Revolution, but after the Ottoman urban transformation project, it had been lined with bibliographic boulevards, and the small streets and alleys were no longer many. This reduced the effectiveness of barricade warfare in the defense of the Commune.
Benjamin quoted in the manuscript of the Arcade Street Project: "The Ottomans built wide and straight avenues to break through dense and winding neighborhoods, but they were not idle and careless; and for miracles, serial novels, and secret gardens of people's conspiracies, those small streets and alleys were their soil." "At the end of the day, the urban spaces of Paris, as the members intuitively felt, represent the governing structure of bourgeoisie. Ironically, according to Benjamin, one of the commune's last strongholds was the Bastille, the place where the Revolution opened in 1789, when Bourgeois, as a revolutionary class, fought with the working people.
The Complete Works of Rimbaud, by Arthur Rimbaud [France], translated by Wang Yipei, Edition: Writers Press, November 2011
After the defeat of the commune
The Bastille is on the right bank of Paris. The last resistance of the members of the society was concentrated on the right bank, and the final massacre of the resistance also occurred on the right bank. In the winter of 2008, when I was studying in Paris, I happened to live on the right bank, and I also went to the Labhez Cemetery in the 20th arrondissement to pay my respects. It was a Sunday in December, typical of the early Parisian winter, gloomy and rainy, wandering through the cemetery, with a cold and wet feel. When I came across the tombs of Chopin, Balzac and even Proust, I only had to press Tussoji, and I turned around for a long time before I came across the tomb of Eugène Boudier, the lyricist of the Internationale. "An International Lament". After walking for a while, I finally came to the paris commune memorial wall. As I hummed the melody of "Unite for Tomorrow," the densely packed tombstones of Paris' largest cemetery had blackened the sky.
Leaving the cemetery, I turned back to Montmartre, feeling along the way accompanied by the undead of history. Montmartre is the place where the boulevards on the right bank are not accessible, full of "tortuous and dense communities" and "small streets", as the "secret garden of the people", which witnessed the whole process of the commune uprising. The Montmartre Incident of March 1871 was the beginning of the workers' takeover of the city's defences and was the trigger for the Commune. In the last days of the Commune, Engels urgently conveyed Marx's military advice: "Consolidate the northern highlands of Montmartre, the Prussian Line". Too late.
After the defeat of the Commune, at the commanding heights of Montmartre, the Third Republic, with the financial support of the big capitalists, agreed to build the Sacré Coeur Cathedral. Although the Basilica of the Sacred Heart was said to commemorate the dead of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1873 the correspondence between the Bishop of Paris and the National Assembly clearly contained the intention of "the crimes of the Commune of Forgiveness". This is another layer of repression on top of the actual military repression: the suppression of the "work" of rebellion in empty official accounts, the suppression of the "streets and alleys of the people" by religious buildings, the suppression of the undead by symbols. This is reminiscent of Democracy in Rimbaud's last collection of prose poems, The Painted Paintings:
In the Metropolis we will feed the most cynical prostitutes. We will slaughter the logical rebellion.
Say goodbye here, wherever you go. We are new to good volunteering and will have our barbaric philosophy. ...... The world is still moving, let him collapse and disintegrate. That's what really works. Go ahead, open the way!
(Based on Wang Daoqian's translation)
Enough of the "hustle and bustle and hue" of the city, the poet "travels far away" ("Color painting collection, travel"). In 1875, Rimbaud stopped "writing and singing" and started the arms smuggling business first by hiking in Europe, then to Java, to the Gulf of Aden, and finally to Africa, in the midst of the imperialist sun. Rimbaud died in Marseille in 1891, before he could return to his hometown.
Today, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart has long been a tourist attraction overlooking the whole of Paris, but its white shape casts a shadow of history. On winter nights, the undead gather in the shadows. How many poets' co-workers, enemies of the times, and undead of history can a poem examine? At the very least, poetry has also been a "logical rebellion"...
It was on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune and the 130th anniversary of Rimbaud's death
The author | Wang Pu
Editor | Zhang Jin
Proofreading | Zhao Lin