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Le Bateau Ivre, or the Limits of Symbolism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Bernard Weinberg
Bernard Weinberg*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, Chicago 37, Ill.
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Extract

Perhaps no other French poem of recent times has been so much discussed, commented on, and analyzed as Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre. Hence it may seem presumptuous on my part to propose to the reader another lengthy discussion of a work about which “everything has been said.” If I do so, it is because of a conviction that much remains still to be said. For whereas there have been proposals for the total reading of the poem which seem to be generally acceptable, these usually fail to do more than suggest the broad general meaning; they do not provide insights into specific passages or solutions to the many difficulties of detail. Moreover, they tend to concentrate on the problem of meaning to the exclusion of the problem of structure, and it is in the problem of structure that I am especially interested. I should wish to discover, in the following pages, not only a more nearly complete reading of Le Bateau Ivre but also the answer (or part of the answer) to a theoretical question that constantly arises in the analysis of symbolist poetry. The problem simply stated is this: How much of a symbolist poem is actually involved in the central symbol about which the poem is built, and what purpose is served by such parts of the poem as are not involved in that symbol? Hence my subtitle, “The Limits of Symbolism,” which does not mean to impose limits upon the poet or to suggest that any such exist in the nature of things, but merely to inquire into the operation of these limits in the case of Le Bateau Ivre.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , March 1957 , pp. 165 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 165 The recent study of Mme E. Noulet, Le Premier Visage de Rimbaud (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1953), devotes an extensive section (pp. 189–280) to this poem. Studies relative to its biographical and literary sources are listed chronologically and summarized. There is little if any analysis of the poem itself.

Note 2 in page 165 I think especially of Wallace Fowlie's reading in his Rimbaud (New York: New Directions, 1946), pp. 67–70. But Fowlie's “literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical” interpretations seem to me to have little justification in the text of the poem itself.

Note 3 in page 165 See Elder Olson, “A Dialogue on Symbolism,” in Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 567–594.

Note 4 in page 174 Most modern texts read “nos”; so does the MS. in the hand of Verlaine (cf. Le Manuscrit autographe, ii, [Nov.–Dec. 1927], 76). But the MS. is in general careless and unreliable. Even if it were completely trustworthy I should be inclined to prefer the reading “vos” of the earlier editions, merely on the basis of internal evidence. Rimbaud is extremely careful to make the boat speak always in terms uniquely appropriate to a boat; since boats do not have lyres, it would be improper for the boat to say “nos lyres,” whereas “vos lyres” addressed to the men to whom the boat is speaking is entirely acceptable.