Love is non-Euclidean: ‘A Season in Hell’ (Arthur Rimbaud, 1873)
A review of A Season in Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud (1873).
A Season in Hell is Rimbaud’s short, sharp lament for the torrid love he shared with Paul Verlaine—a relationship that left Rimbaud with a broken heart, ruined reputation, and a bullet in his left arm.
The poem is about pain. It is about suffering. But it is not about escaping nor enduring it. No, Rimbaud is travelling willingly to hell so that its tortures may blot out a love he can no longer bear. He is rapacious for self-annihilation, tossing back and forth as he seeks out deeper and deeper forms of despair, till he can “make every trace of human hope vanish from [his] mind”.
Rimbaud digs into every crevice to find metaphors and similes with which to find a liberating sufferings. His pain is formless and constantly metamorphosing, into the trauma of violent colonial pioneers and their victims and men in the throes of suicidal agony and abused wives and demons and consumptive libertines hollowed out by their prolonged debauchery. Hells exist everywhere, not just in Hades, and Rimbaud has set out to find them all.
The language is so extreme, so expansive, such an orgiastic expression of distress because emotional suffering is not bound by the limits of physical sensation. It need not even be bound by experience; and is it not usually the opposite? Emotional suffering is far sharper in young loves and first heartbreaks than the jaded and scarred for it is forever pushing onto new tender territory. Rimbaud cannot escape the love because it is in his own head, so must transform that space rather than flee it. A Season in Hell is his attempt to drown this emotion in a poetry of harsh sensations and cruelty till he is numbed into absolute apathy.
Whilst the concept of self-destruction to escape love is not exactly unique, A Season in Hell was not well received when it was published. The literary world thought very little of it and when they did it was only to heap scorn on Rimbaud. But the main critique is what would later give it such a impactful afterlife. The poem was considered jumbled and incoherent and vulgar because that is what heartbreak is like. What are we trying to do? Subjects ourselves to suffering to avoid another type of suffering? It’s irrational and that’s the point. Emotions are not physical object and do not respond in rational ways. That’s what A Season in Hell captures. It translates the chaotic, symbolic, and pre-literate universe of emotions into text. It is an attempt to capture in its raw form the mindset of heartbreak, and it is because of this early exploration why it remains such an important influence on modern literature.
-Ben Shread-Hewitt