another way of being
It’s not surprising probably, but still it is exhilarating that one of Julio’s first published writings was a short essay on Arthur Rimbaud.1
It’s an essay in which he works through his split affinities: for Mallarmé and the pure, disembodied perfect Book, on the one hand, and for Rimbaud and the flawed, but moving insistence on the integration of life and writing, on the bringing of writing to bear on life, and especially on the breaking out of the strictures of the ego.
As so often, Julio seems very open and accepting of the contradictory impulses within himself and thus again – though perhaps for the first time as a writer – demonstrates his fundamental integrity – which is to say his fundamental appreciation for his multiplicity, his many selves [Ù8]. And it is perhaps this very appreciation that leads him finally to state, “With all my devotion to the great poet [Mallarmé], I feel that my being, insofar as it is whole [en cuanto integral], goes toward Rimbaud with a tenderness that is brotherhood and nostalgia.”2
The elements constituting this affinity will sound familiar by now. There is, to begin with, Julio’s sense that Rimbaud was above all a human being and thus approached poetry as a “key to human realization.” There is also the belief, held by Julio and which he attributes to Rimbaud, that this human realization must necessarily occur via a departure from the self, a kind of breaking open of the self so as to allow (or to recognize) its mixing with otherness [Ù23, 28, 37, 40]. Hence Rimbaud’s famous slogan: “Je est un autre” [I is an other].
Indeed, Julio seizes on this phrase to point out that while the roots of surrealism’s search for otherness might well be traced to Rimbaud, the latter’s phrase ought to be grasped not in terms of a flight from the self, but as a liberation of the self.
It’s this sort of attempted aperture that Rimbaud’s poems chronicle, like the diaries of a voyage. All that is required to decipher this effort in the poems is “la inocencia necesaria.”
By “necessary innocence” I take Julio to mean a kind of beginner’s mind that doesn’t see Rimbaud’s words as the words of a Poet, at least not at first, but simply as the report of a human being searching for another way of being, a way of being whose achievement and shape both require a twisting of usual language into what experts call poetry [Ù76].
1 See Jaime Alazraki, “Cortázar antes de Cortázar: ‘Rimbaud’ (1941)” in his book Hacia Cortázar: aproximaciones a su obra (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994), pp. 13-29.
2 Julio Cortázar, “Rimbaud” [1941] Obra crítica/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 22, my translation.