Rimbaud the Son

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Take it into your head to write a preface to Rimbaud, writes Pierre Michon, and your wings fall off; you start quoting the saints of the almanac. Duly warned, we proceed with caution and will be brief. Rimbaud le fils (Rimbaud the Son) was published in France in 1991, seven years after Michon’s first book, Vies minuscules (Small Lives). Vies minuscules won Michon immediate acclaim and was quickly followed by other successes; Rimbaud le fils was his fifth published work. Although still relatively unknown to readers in the United States, Michon is widely recognized in Europe as one of France’s foremost contemporary writers. He won the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie Française for his most recent novel, Les Onze (The Eleven), and the Prix de la Ville de Paris for his entire opus.

In Rimbaud le fils, Michon asks what drives art. What explains a poet’s devotion to the word and then our own devotion to that poet after he abandons it? Through Rimbaud, Michon explores his recurring themes: the absent father, the smothering mother, the backwater upbringing, and how they shape that tortured mix of genius and ambition we call an artist. Although Michon begins with Vitalie Cuif, Rimbaud’s mother, it is really the paternal line, the father — or fathers — that interests him. Rimbaud le fils traces lineage as determined by literature and how Rimbaud becomes literature incarnate, only to reject that patrimony.

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