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Rimbaud and La Tentation De Saint Antoine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Francis J. Carmody
Francis J. Carmody*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4
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Extract

The use that Rimbaud made of the definitive version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, first published on 5 April 1874, throws light on the evolution of his poetics as well as his ideologies. The source book, one of the most distinguished vulgarizations of Hindu and gnostic thought, presents eastern illuminism and panoramic views of Alexandria in passages that Flaubert composed for the first time in 1871, after serious study of thousands of pages of ancient texts, and his new portrait of Saint Anthony is of special interest in that no sources have been located for it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 1964 , pp. 594 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907

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References

1 For all bio-bibliographical fact I cite Bouillane (identified below), and Suzanne Bernard's edition of the Œuvres (e.g., here from p. 245) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1960). The Œuvres in the Collection de la Pléiade (Paris, 1954) contains no useful notes regarding sources or interpretations, but I use its numbering system for Les Illuminations in preference to that of Mme Bernard.

2 Bouillane de Lacoste, Rimbaud et le problème des Illuminations (Paris: Mercure de France, 1949).

3 Bernard, p. 205.

4 Issues of 21 and 28 Dec. 1856 and of 11 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1857.

5 I cite this text from the current Charpentier edition, Paris, s. d., 295 pages. For details regarding the composition of La Tentation, see my article “Further Sources of La Tentation de Saint Antoine,” RR, xlIX (1958), 278–292. Flaubert completed his manuscript in June 1872, and it did not leave his hands until he sent it to Charpentier on 12 Dec. 1873.

6 Edited as La Première Tentation by Louis Bertrand, Paris: Charpentier (I cite the reprint of 1929).

7 Regarding the influence of Lautréamont, see my article “A Correlation of the Chronology and the Lexicon of Rimbaud's Verse,” FR, xxxiii (1960), 249–254. I deal similarly with the influence of Flaubert, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud in The Evolution of Apollinaire's Poetics, 1901–1914, Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Pubs. in Modern Philology, lxx (1963), 130 pp.

8 Mme Bernard (p. 504) mentions Martin, the Crystal Palace, and other places in London, for general correspondences of theme.

9 I refer as follows: William Blake, Illustrations to the Bible, Clairvaux, 1957; Gustave Doré, The Bible, Illustrated, New York, 1951, and The Complete Poems of John Milton, New York, 1936; Martin and Westall, Illustrations of the Old and New Testaments, London, 1837; Martin, Paradise Lost, London, 1833. See also Thomas Balston, John Martin, London, 1947.

10 See Tallis's Crystal Palace, 3 vols. (London, 1851?), and Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition (London, 1851), with elaborate lists and engravings.

11 See Alfred Chapuis, Les Automates (Neuchâtel, 1949), pp. 16, 140, 161.