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PARTISAN REVIEW
molish the world of external perception and to discover another world
behind it. Commenting on
((Nocturne Vulgaire,JJ
he remarks:
A hiatus fonns ; a sly and mysterious chink appears in things and
disabuses them of the idea that they are held together. There is in
Rimbaud a motif which might be called the crevice or the breach. In
a corner of the picture something suddenly happens which threatens
its solidity, an imperceptible fissure which climbs, goes down again
and spreads, a tear which opens and extends. The damage always
begins at the top of the picture.
The world of external perception falls apart before our eyes.
"The houses no longer follow one another" ; but unless there were
something behind it, the result would be meaningless and chaotic:
Rimbaud's art and
metier
imply the existence of an external ob–
ject. . . . His world would be incomprehensible if we did not suppose
the existence of this X. . . . Suppress it, and Rimbaud is no more than
an acrobat performing a series of the vainest and most contradictory
exercises.
It is an extremely intelligent hypothesis, and whether or not we
agree that Rimbaud discovered a new realm behind the world of
common experience or that he is "a marvelous introduction to Chris–
tianity," it does offer a possible way through the labyrinth of the
Illuminations.
The essay on
((Le Roman d'A uenture JJ
provides a convenient
bridge between Riviere's pre-war and post-war criticism. The Symbo–
list poets had been among Riviere's earliest admirations. "Symbolism,"
he had said in a letter to Alain-Fournier, "is the true poetry because it
abolished the oratorical poetry of the Romantics." The essay begins
with a penetrating though one-sided criticism of Symbolism and goes
on to fonnulate Riviere's theory of a new classicism. Symbolism, he
proclaims, is dead and is no longer capable of providing a stimulus
for living writers. It was not, as people made out, "a decadent art,
a paradoxical and rotten fruit produced by an almost exhausted
sap ... but it cannot be denied that
it
is an
art
of extreme self-con–
sciousness. . . . The subject is never an event, a story or even the
description of a soul, the picture of a living being. It is always an
emotion-an abstract emotion, completely pure and without cause
or roots, an impression detached from its origin."
