Rimbaud in The Secret History.
@spookedstarzz
“A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies”
“To me [or My turn]. The story of one of my follies [or madnesses]”
This is the first of many allusions and quotations referencing classical or seminal authors found in The Secret History. Often these will be encountered unattributed and/or untranslated, whether that be from Greek, Latin, or French, so as to emphasize thematic elements in the novel by inviting readers to embody them. For example, when a reader recognizes a reference in the text, it is as if they have been integrated into the Greek class, partaking in a moment of private triumph made all the more rewarding for having caught something that will be understood by some but not all. Having been incorporated deeper into the mythos of Hampden, likewise, is a deeper understanding of the narrative, thus rewarded to readers as commendation for a proficient understanding of the literary canon. Or inversely, the reader is forsaken, left in the sylvan dark, wandering lost in translation, as esoteric references serve to emphasize the novel's themes of academic elitism and becoming distanced from contemporary sensibilities, by excluding even the reader from conversation and narration.
With that in mind, the option of a reread championed by the newly won context of research is always possible. One such instance of this, for me, was “A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies,” originally taken from a prose poem by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, “Une Saison en Enfer [A Season in Hell] [1].” It appears on the first page of book one, chapter one, when Richard Papen uses it to indicate his involvement in murder under yet unknown circumstances. Though we can assume from this line alone, as follie directly translates to madness or folly [2], that Richard’s misery is of his own making, just as was Rimbaud’s, what's especially interesting about Richard’s relating himself to Rimbaud here, however, is that “A Season in Hell” was the first hybrid work to be composed of both a forward and backward consideration of history and literature, told in a first person reportorial, abandoning strict, traditional poetic meters in favor of fractured prose poetry, depicting “identity’s destruction” and “the stampeding of self beneath the footfalls of history” (Mason). Sound familiar? What's more is that Richard explicitly likens himself physically to Rimbaud in chapter five when cutting his hair, discussing the logistics of using Amanita caesaria with Henry.
(Left to Right): Arthur Rimbaud at the age of 17 (Étienne Carjat, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons), A young Donna Tartt (Uncredited)
It’s no secret that Donna Tartt herself greatly admired Rimbaud, or at the very least resonated deeply with his work; aside from the two aforementioned references, a third Rimbaud quote can be found in The Secret History [3], as well as another included in the introduction of The Goldfinch [4]. All this to say that I had to do a winterpapen-centric reading, natch, of A Season in Hell. I know that sounds contrived; however, this was not a comparison I set out to make, but rather one that I found organically, in the wilds, and what are books if not the afterlife of trees, rife with the spirit of ideas (I say knowing damn well I read on a tablet). There’s one chapter specifically featured in A Season in Hell, that practically hits you over the head with parallels: The Foolish Virgin, The Hellish Husband, a confession in which Rimbaud recounts, in retrospect, how his volatile, drug-infused romance with then lover, Paul Verlaine [5], an older poet whom he greatly admired, contributed to his mental decline and ultimately, coincidentally enough, got him shot (in the wrist, he lived).
I’ve compiled my favorite passages for your viewing pleasure here:
“Next to his sweetly sleeping body, I spent so many sleepless hours trying to figure out why he wanted to escape from reality. No man before him had wished for such a thing. I was aware—without being afraid of him—that he could be a menace to society. Maybe he had found a way to change life as we know it? No, he was only searching, or so he said. His charity is bewitching, and I am its prisoner. No other soul was strong enough—the strength of despair!—to have withstood his protection and love. And anyway, I couldn’t imagine him with anyone else: we know only the Angel we’re given, never another, or so I believe. I inhabited his heart as one might a place: it was empty, precisely so no one would learn that a person as ignoble as you [referring to himself] were there: and there it is. Alas! I needed him. But what did he want with me, drab and lifeless as I was? He didn't make me a better person, and he didn't manage to kill me! Sad, angry, I would occasionally say, 'I understand you.’ He'd just shrug his shoulders.
“…I grew more and more hungry for some measure of kindness from him. His kisses and his warm embraces were a heaven, a dark heaven, into which I had entered, and where I would have preferred to have remained: poor, deaf, mute, blind. I got used to it. I saw us as two good children, free to stroll Heavenly sadness. We got along perfectly. We worked side by side, filled with emotion. But, after a penetrating caress, he said: ‘How ridiculous all you've been through will seem when I'm no longer here. When you no longer have my arms beneath your neck, nor my heart to lie upon, nor my mouth upon your eyes. Because one day, I’ll go far away. I must make myself useful to others, too: it's my duty. However unsavory this seems ... dear heart ...’ Immediately, in the wake of his absence, I felt both gripped by vertigo and thrown into the most unbearable darkness: death. I made him swear he wouldn't leave me. He swore a lover's promise twenty times over. It was as meaningless as when I said, ‘I understand you’.
“…From time to time, I forget my pitiful circumstances and think: he'll make me strong, we'll explore together, we'll hunt in deserts, we'll sleep on the sidewalks of unknown cities, without worries, without sorrow. Or I'll awake and find that his magical powers will have transformed all laws and customs, leaving the world intact; I'll be left with my desires, joys, insouciance [carelessness, nonchalance, in French]. Oh, give me this life of innocent adventure in return for the suffering I've endured. But he won't. I can't appreciate his ideals. He told me he has regrets, hopes: but they don't concern me. Does he speak of God? Perhaps I should. I'm at the very bottom of the abyss, and I've forgotten how to pray.
“Were he to explain his sorrows, would I understand them better than his derision? He attacks me, spending hours making me feel guilty for everything that has ever meant anything to me in this life, and yet, he takes umbrage when I cry.
“…Alas! There were days when he believed all mankind's motions were dictated by some wholesale, grotesque delirium: and he'd laugh wretchedly, at length. —Then, like some sweet sister, his maternal impulses would return. Were he less of a savage, we'd be saved! But even his sweetness is mortal. Surrendered, I follow. —I'm insane.
"Perhaps one day he'll miraculously disappear; but were he returned to heaven, I would need to know that I might glimpse my darling's assumption [the taking up of a person into heaven].
“One strange couple.”
—Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell” (1873)
(Left to Right): Verlaine & Rimbaud, Brussels, 1873, Paul Verlaine, 1866 (Public Domain, via Wikipedia Commons)
Okay, sooo, this next bit will be a bit winterpapen heavy; you could read it as platonic if you squint really hard, but if you’re just not about it, this is your stop, I’m afraid. It was lovely to have you.
An intertextual reading of The Secret History and A Season in Hell (particularly The Foolish Virgin, The Hellish Husband) has a striking continuity regarding themes of self-destruction, obsession over aesthetics, and moral collapse; rendering both works retrospective dramatizations, tragedies [6] that warn of the danger of allowing oneself to be seduced into corruption under the charismatic guise of spiritual transcendence and integration into an otherwise select party. Structurally, these narratives are confessional in nature, taking place after a great interpersonal calamity. In A Season in Hell, it varies in a given moment whether the narrator is speaking from a place of accusation, clarity, irony, self-loathing, or longing, content instead to establish no stable stance and explore fracture as a state of the psyche. Similarly, Richard aestheticizes and rationalizes the past, trying in vain to gain some perspective while counterintuitively remaining emotionally attached to a history that was not kind to him, nor in which were his actions particularly altruistic, rendering his narration unreliable and his efforts in vain. We now have two narrators who confess without wholly repenting, their respective rationale, yet are crippled by the romanticization of their suffering and the obfuscation of memory by desire. The subsequent effect is literature that implicates the reader themselves into the seduction taking place, forcibly aligning one’s consumption of the narrative with a fascination in the lesser acknowledged, destructive side of brilliance.
In Rimbaud’s work, the Hellish Husband with whom the Foolish Virgin is infatuated, is commonly agreed to be a distorted depiction of Paul Verlaine, though it's not far-fetched to read both parts as a projection of Rimbaud himself, given how taken he was, in the way of the Hellish Husband, with the rejection of both modern sensibilities and convention being indicative of depth, believing the poet must become a visionary through excess, suffering intoxication and moral dissolution; the “derangement of all the senses” (Rimbaud, Mason) in order to perceive what others do not. This is why the Husband is so magnetic, because he exists outside ordinary morality, rejecting bourgeois values and sentimentality at the cost of stability. The Foolish Virgin suffers because he confuses the suffering brought on by this lifestyle with proof of righteous devotion. His attachment to the Husband becomes masochistic; he accepts humiliation and emotional abuse because he believes proximity to genius justifies pain and will result in revelation, that the Husband might bestow his approval by halting the withholding of his love, and the Virgin will have experienced enough “derangement of sense” that his relationship to the world and his craft, will be altered in the form of revelation, thus rendering the trials endured “worth it.”
Likewise, in The Secret History, the Greek class orbits around Henry Winter with an almost religious devotion. Henry’s intelligence, commitment to aesthetics, and access to wealth elevate him beyond ordinary social codes; Richard narrates this attraction in nearly mythical language, placing Henry always a cut above the rest, aristos achaion, oneiric lover. Henry's orchestration of the bacchanal predicates on his belief that modern consciousness alienates humanity from ancient rapturous truth. Like the Foolish Virgin, Richard, and the others mistake this mystique born of alienation and justification of amorality, exclusive to those “in the know,” for profundity. In this philosophy, ordinary morality appears vulgar or simplistic, thus allowing Richard to indulge his darker inclinations in the pursuit of knowledge, at his own detriment, and the Greek class to justify the cover-up of one death and the orchestration of another, a friend, with what should be no guilt. But it doesn’t, of course, quite shake out that way.
Nevertheless, if, in a diffuse, sacerdotal way, Henry is the embodiment of the Hellish Husband archetype: the beautiful intellectual tyrant, aloof and dogmatic in his beliefs, whose power comes from an apparent transcendence of human weakness, then Julian Morrow is the philosophical ethos that makes Henry possible. It’s Julian who sanctifies the conditions under which corruption becomes not only plausible, but elegant and morally defensible. When Henry embodies these ideals, it’s Julian’s teachings that authorize it, and Richard, who wants to emulate it second-hand from Henry, that in achieving that closeness, he’ll gain the knowledge and privileges enjoyed by him as well as garner his affection and approval. Much the same does the Hellish Husband embody, and gain his authority from, his visionary doctrine in which the Foolish Virgin is desperate to achieve, for gaining this knowledge would award him transcendence and the Husband’s love both. However, as we know, this love and desire to be loved is the vehicle of both narrators' ruination. Rimbaud’s Virgin says, in essence: “I’m ruined because I believed in him.” Richard’s narration echoes much the same tragic logic, ironic given that he could just as well be read as Narcissus. Even after murder most foul and the ruin of their little slice of world at Hapden, their sacred temenos, he remains aesthetically enthralled by the experience, and still very much in love with Henry.
Moving right along, in A Season in Hell, Rimbaud secularizes the notion of Hades, likening damnation to more of a psychological imprisonment; the consequences of one's self-destructive actions as opposed to any divine punishment. Addiction to illusions, desire, and the pursuit of transcendence leaves him in a state of paranoia, alienation, and emotional decay, fostering in him an inability to reconnect with ordinary life after pledging himself so wholly to the Husband and his philosophy (not to mention the bestowal of one final lesson to remember him by, yup, bullet hole). Likewise, after Bunny’s murder, the Greek class, or what's left of it, inhabits a distinctly Rimbaudian hell: spiritually exhausted and morally unmoored, they are unable to return to that blissful innocence enjoyed in the late summer and autumn months. Their attempts to smooth over the circumstances only serve to entrench them further in psychic decay. At the same time, Henry’s emotional and intellectual fortitude, under the heat of Apollo's arrow, proved not to be so infallible as Julien’s doctrine would have them all believe. Upon Henry’s, and therefore Richard’s, incessant clinging to the philosophies that have yet only served to exacerbate character flaws, as opposed to set one laudably apart from the ignorance of modern society, the loss of Julian, id est the authority with which their entire worldview rested, is a devastating blow; one which Henry, the last remaining vestige of that mythologised transcendental pursuit, cannot reconcile. Subsequently, Richard’s concluding melancholy resembles the exhausted consciousness of Rimbaud’s speaker: both have lost their prospective loves to chasing a myth, while they themselves survive catastrophe only to never achieve absolution.
Foot Notes
[1] Specifically found in the chapter “Alchimie du Verbe [The Alchemy of the Word]”.
[2] It shares the same Old French root (folie) as the English word folly, both evolving from the word for "fool" (fol) (etymonline).
[3] Le Bateau ivre [The Drunked Boat] (1871), quoted by Francis in a letter to Richard in the epilogue: “Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré! Les aubes sont navrantes [But, truly, I have wept too much! The dawns are heartbreaking] [translation by Erie Greike].
[4] Quand nous sommes très forts, - qui recule ? très gais, qui tombe de ridicule ? Quand nous sommes très méchants, que ferait-on de nous [When we are very strong, who draws back? or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us] [translation by Wallace Fowlie].
[5] Verlaine’s poem, Femme Et Chatte [Woman and Cat] is dedicated to a person named Henry Winter (as pointed out by Reddit user midnightpurplexii).
[6] The hallmark of all tragedies is that they will tell you what they are at the very beginning; this is true of both The Secret History and A Season in Hell.
Works Cited
“The definitive translation for our time.” –Edward Hirs…
Rimbaud, Arthur, and Wyatt Mason. A Season in Hell & Illuminations. The Modern Library, 2005.
Book by Rimbaud, Arthur
Rimbaud, Arthur. "The Drunken Boat." The Drunken Boat & Other Poems from the French of Arthur Rimbaud, translated by L. Eric Greinke, 4th ed., Presa Press, 2007.
The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Ar…
Rimbaud, Arthur. Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Wallace Fowlie, revised by Seth Whidden, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics profe…
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. Knopf, 1992.
