Rimbaud Analysis Part 2: Verlaine, Chuuya, and Humanity
Welcome back to Jax-yaps-way-too-long-about-a-character-with-3-seconds-of-screentime! Hope you enjoyed the last 780 word post about a singular line. Anyway.
A lot of people view Rimbaud as the one person who could affirm Verlaine's humanity. Which is fair enough, Verlaine makes this claim himself at the end of Stormbringer. Rimbaud asserts that Verlaine is human regardless of his origin or his feelings on the matter
However, there is strong textual evidence that none of what he says is something he really believes, not fully. At the very least, he has severe cognitive dissonance between what he says to Verlaine vs his actions and words with Chuuya. In Rimbaud's last journal entry, he writes this:
Pay attention to the way he dehumanizes Chuuya. He is an "it". "It" has the appearance of a young boy. "It" is a model, a weapon. This is hours after celebrating Verlaine's birth and humanity. The juxtaposition of this line contrasting the rest of the entry is stark.
The very next day, when Verlaine turns on and betrays Rimbaud, that sentiment is repeated. "You're human, your origins don't matter. We've had this discussion many times." Verlaine does not believe him, he expresses how distressed he is over his origin. Rimbaud regards him with dismissal rather than empathy or understanding.
Interestingly enough, he does not refer to Chuuya the same way when he's face to face with Verlaine. Suddenly, he's a child to be raised and not a weapon to be used.
The flip is subtle and I don't even think Rimbaud himself realizes he's doing it, because in his journals he truly does seem to regard Verlaine highly as a human. It's all about subconscious bias. Verlaine and Chuuya have identical origins (that he is aware of) and yet he speaks of, treats, and thinks of them very differently.
When Rimbaud joins the mafia and searches for Chuuya, none of this has changed. There are two lines here I think are worth talking about in the fight with Chuuya.
These are two very different sentiments that he holds when it comes to killing Dazai vs Chuuya. One he mourns as the loss of human life, the other he regards as nothing more than an object to be used and a tool with no inherent value.
It took him regaining his memories and dying to see his own mistakes and the way he treated both Chuuya and Verlaine alike.
It's during this reckoning that he speaks to Chuuya, finally affirming his identity. He finally recognizes what he did to cause Verlaine to fall away and resent him. In this moment, he's not dismissing Chuuya as human regardless of his feelings as struggles, he's speaking to what he realized to late that Verlaine needed to hear.
Its why no part of me believes Rimbaud is malicious, even in his callous disregard towards Verlaine and his struggles and his hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. He's unintentionally cruel to Verlaine, but in his final moments he's finally able to empathize with him through Chuuya, who he viewed as an object and a tool.
I think its a great, perhaps unintentional, allegory for bigotry and internalized biases. I'll get deeper into that when I eventually post my Stormbringer analysis through a queer lens
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