728
PARTISAN .REVIEW
d'Ashby, the mysterious heroine of one of the
Illuminations,
has helped
to justify Etiemble's second use of myth in the central part of his thesis.
He claims that the statement found in Pierre Debray is not at all ex–
ceptional: "Since God exempted Rimbaud from the ordinary condition
of man, his immaculate conception . . . " A decalcomania has been
forged whereby every episode in Rimbaud's life corresponds to an epi–
sode in the life of Christ: the birth at Bethlehem, the debate with the
doctors, the forty days in the desert, the way of the cross, the death,
resurrection, transfiguration. The sacrament of suicide has been initiated
by Vache, Rigaud, Hart Crane in the name of Rimbaud.
The sentence of Roger Caillois, whispered to a neighbor at the
"soutenance," "Ils appellent
~a
religion, ce n'est que de l'inflation ver–
bale,"
was quoted by Etiemble in his letter to
Arts
and provoked a reply
of Caillois himself the following week (February 1) . Caillois first em–
phasized that the "they" of his sentence refers to everyone: the critics
of Rimbaud who consider him a god, Etiemble in as much as he im–
agines they believe him a god, the professors of the Sorbonne jury in
as much as they agree with the investigation. Etiemble's article in
Arts
had clearly defined the two uses of myth. Caillois has no quarrel with
the first general meaning of falsification. It is the second sociological
meaning of the term, as used by Etiemble, that Caillois questions. Both
aspects are based upon words, expressions, metaphors. The vocabulary is
religious, but Caillois considers that the writers who used it were not
religious. The fact that they said Rimbaud was a god does not neces–
sarily imply that they believe it. The altar erected by Breton was a
poetic gesture and the word
aseity,
used by Louis de Gonzague-Frick,
may have been borrowed from Apollinaire's
L e Larron.
Breton's altar
had no piety attached to it and the word
aseity
had no connection with
dogma. Caillois wonders whether the recent postal stamps bearing the
face of Rimbaud (from the Fantin-Latour portrait) have greatly af–
fected the idolaters. Between such phenomena and religion in its pure
sense, there are many intermediaries. A suicide, for example, is neither
a rite nor a sacrament unless it be performed in some kind of ceremony
and fulfill some theological function. Otherwise it is simply a gesture
of revolt or despair, far more philosophical than religious. To substan–
tiate his viewpoint, Caillois recalls the activities of the bobby-soxers in
relationship to Frank Sinatra. There were societies formed, insignia,
faintings, collective manifestations. The articles in
T he New Yorker
re–
vealed that a religious vocabulary was used and a degree of ecstasy
reached in some of the
ma~ifestations
which seemed liturgical.
If
the
fanatical disciples of Rimbaud have created out of his life a decal
co-
