Rimbaud le fils

A luminous, incandescent and profound text by Pierre Michon devoted to Rimbaud; rather than retracing the poet’s life, it questions what a poet leaves behind: a legend, a silence, a burn.

Commissioned for the “L’un et l’autre” series — conceived by J.-B. Pontalis as a space for intimate portraits, halfway between narrative and essay — Rimbaud le fils is a pivotal text in Pierre Michon’s work, on a par with Vies minuscules. Michon does not “tell” the life of Arthur Rimbaud: he observes the making of a figure and the trace it leaves — “a legend, a silence, a burn.” The “son” of the title is at once the child of a mother, a language, a century, and the metaphorical son of all who come after him, writers and readers alike. Michon implicitly casts himself as a son of Rimbaud, questioning literary debt and filiation, and dwells on minimal documents rather than the great episodes: Carjat’s photograph, the terse letters, the shadow of Une saison en enfer, the silhouettes of Charleville and the bare violence of the Illuminations.