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ANCESTORS FROM The Baffler No. 22 2013

Jean-Arthur Rimbaud
THOMAS BERNHARD

Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) wrote this lecture—published in English for the first time here—for Jean-Arthur
Rimbaud’s (1854–1891) one-hundredth birthday. Bernhard was twenty-three when he delivered it at the Hotel Pitter in
Salzburg before a small audience that called itself the “Bergen Circle.” It was first published in the May 14, 2009, issue of
the German newspaper Die Zeit, and recently included in an anthology of Bernhard’s writings, Der Wahrheit auf der
Spur. Bernhard’s account of Rimbaud’s life and work is riddled with brazen exaggerations and inaccuracies (Verlaine did
love more than the “poetic strength” of his “brother”; Rimbaud was in Yemen for three years before moving to Harare,
etc.) of the sort that would become the Austrian writer’s literary trademark. “Without exaggerating,” Bernhard once told
a journalist, “you can’t say anything.”

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enerable Assembly,

The saying goes that we honor poets only when they

are dead, when the lid of the burial vault or the wet
mound of earth has definitively separated him from
us, when the creator of lyrical poems, having
suffered in hardship and misery—as it is so
beautifully and disconcertingly put in the obituaries
of inferior spirits—has given up his spirit. And as
God would have it, there will appear a national
office that will begin leafing through its address
book, and so the work of posterity gets underway.
Then come the laurels and “laurel-ettes,” and an
amusing intercourse develops between wine tavern
and ministry until the record of the poet either
disappears or someone has resolved to publish his
works. There are celebrations and pomp, the
pensum of the dead is discovered, dragged into the
light—the poet is “staged”—mainly just to stave off
boredom, which is what one is actually being paid
for. And so (in our country!) it is not the poet who
is honored, but rather the gentleman from the
cultural office who delivers the greeting, the Honorable Sir, Executor of Poetry; the actor, the performer. Many a
Hölderlin or Georg Trakl would turn over in his grave from so much contrived, grafted culture, from so much
art-market talk from which nothing but indecency emerges!

This is about remembering Jean-Arthur Rimbaud. Thank God he was a Frenchman! Let us then believe in the power
and the glory of the poetic word, let us believe in the everlasting life of the spirit, in the resilience of images (of the
dead and visions), as they emerge from between the pages of a few great men, exceptions of the sort that appear just
once or twice in a century. Let’s not deceive ourselves: the mighty, thrilling, stirring, and calming, the enduring; these
do not grow like common sorrel in a summer field! Such great verse, to which humanity owes its glimpse into the
depths, does not emerge every day, nor every year. Several thousand books must be pounded out before the machine
makes an elemental lunge and presents us with one, if only one, significant piece of world literature. Those that
forever hang on the big bell and can be heard clear to the pubs, the journal-poets and the export-articles of
literature—they are mostly well-coiffed manufacturers of drivel and trend. In literature the only thing that matters is
the original, indeed, the elemental. Like Jean-Arthur Rimbaud.

The poet of France was truly elemental, his verses were of flesh and blood. A hundred years is nothing for this master Related
of words, the untranslatable Rimbaud. He grabbed hold of life, unconventionally, by the roots, packed it full of awe
and an obsession with death. His poetry is finished; at the age of twenty-three he snapped shut his book, his Reflections on Violence in
the United States

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