Rimbaud le fils
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Édouard, en attendant Vince Taylor, avec amitié, Pierre Michon.”
A luminous, incandescent and profound text by Pierre Michon devoted to Rimbaud. Rather than retracing the poet’s life, it interrogates what a poet leaves behind: a legend, a silence, a burn.
The inscription conjures an unexpected and revealing image: that of Vince Taylor, doomed rocker, fallen idol, a dark and flamboyant figure (who notably inspired David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust”), a black angel of the twentieth century, whose trajectory echoes that of the author of Une saison en enfer.
The mention of Vince Taylor functions here as a mirror. Like Rimbaud, Taylor is a meteor: Michon seems to build a bridge between the dazzling poet and a shattered singer, both of whom became mythical as much through their disappearance as through their work, where high and popular culture converge in a single tragic gesture.
“You know, Vince Taylor is someone whose story I would like to write […]. It’s a terrible story. It’s pathetic. You know, literature has to make people cry a little in their cottages […]. From time to time, in a small passage, the reader’s heart has to start to… even in the sharpest, least pathetic realists, or those who want to be the least so, I’m thinking of people like Houellebecq, or Despentes sometimes, and that’s why they’re good, there’s a little tremor…” (Interview with Augustin Trapenard, 21 cm, 2019).
A fine copy.