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PARTISAN REVIEW
shouldn't be added to the list. Etiemble replied that in a recent stock–
taking, Rimbaud surpassed Lautreamont and Mallarme combined, and
that he feared the Artaud myth promulgated by the
Revue K
where the
name Artaud was considered to be a mysterious contraction of
Art(hur
Rimb)aud.
During the second half of the
«soutenance,"
Professor Carre, in
his
praise of Etiemble's work, called it the most extensive investigation
on a quasi-contemporary writer. He even confessed that he himself had
added to the myth of Rimbaud as Christian, and approved of Etiemble
castigating himself for contributing to the myth of Rimbaud as com–
munard. M. Jasinski, the last of the jury to speak, was the most critical,
the most adverse to the idea of the thesis and especially to the spirit
in which it had been written. He even suggested that Etiemble doesn't
like Rimbaud and is perpetrating in his thesis some kind of vengeance
on the poet who must have harmed him when he was young! In de–
scribing the thesis as a whole, he used the word
canular,
from the
language of the Ecole Normale Superieure, which designates an elabor–
ate trick of mystification.
Despite this severe stricture, the decision of the jury was unanimous
in granting M. Etiemble the degree of
«doctorat d'etat, mention tres
honorable,
a
l'unanimite."
This word,
canular,
must have struck the imagination of Etiemble
who, from Montpellier, where he resumed his teaching in the university,
sent to the weekly newspaper
Arts,
a letter on the question of whether
the myth of Rimbaud is a
«canular."
At the time of the
((soutenance,"
the word had amused him. He knew that the rules of the game de–
manded that the jury inflict some degree of torture on the candidate–
victim. But with the report that the sociologist, Roger Caillois, had also
considered exaggerated the use of "myth" or "religion" when it was
only a question of verbal inflation, Etiemble began wondering if he
him–
self were the real creator of the myth and whether he had been de–
ceiving himself during the twenty years' labor. He reread his 2,000
pages without having his convictions altered. In applying the word myth
to the first part of his
Structure du
My
the
: the various characterizations
of Rimbaud as surrealist, existentialist, Communist, atheist, Catholic,
voyou, etc., he is using the term
in
its loosest connotation of error, col–
lective lie, illusion. But in the second part of the main thesis, he uses
the word
in
its fuller sense of legend in its relationship with the super–
natural and involving some kind of rite. The fact that twenty authors
have spoken of Rimbaud as the myth of Satan, and that Andre Breton
in
the surrealist exhibition of 1947 erected an altar to Leonie Aubois
