Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Buffet": my paper at the conference "Pockets, Pouches & Secret Drawers"

Je participerai prochainement au colloque Pockets, Pouches & Secret Drawers organisé à l'IMLR (School of Advanced Study, University of London) du 2 au 4 décembre 2021.

Vous trouverez ci-dessous le résumé de ma communication, “Rimbaud’s Le Buffet. What is really inside?”, et une présentation du colloque.

Abstract: “Rimbaud’s Le Buffet. What is really inside?”

Rimbaud’s Le Buffet is very different from Rodolphe’s cabinet (Madame Bovary, II, xiii), which is an ironic metaphor of his (lack of) feelings towards Emma; or from Baudelaire’s “gros meuble à tiroir” (Spleen), which is an allegory of the poet’s state of mind. Rimbaud’s poem depicts indeed an old piece of furniture and what is inside, with lyricism and tenderness, as if this evocation of such a “fouillis de vieilles vieilleries” should be his only purpose.

I will show that if we contextualize Le Buffet, a text written in October 1870, just after the fall of the Second Empire and the foundation of the Third Republic, the various trinkets crammed into the cupboard drawers are strongly linked to republican if not socialist imaginary – and not only because they belong to “old people” and “old times”, in contrast to Napoleon III’s modern Paris and to the new bourgeois money-makers the regime favored.

In the end, it will appear that Le Buffet fits with a double gesture of exposure and protection: the young poet exposes his strong support to the all-new republic, but he does it by hiding it in a cupboard, by enclosing his political convictions in an encrypted allegory. Then, if Rimbaud’s poem is not just a gentle daydream on a piece of furniture, it does not implement either the same kind of metaphor or allegory than Flaubert and Baudelaire did: in Le Buffet, images are not only reflecting a state of mind, real or fictional, but also a world fragment.

Pockets, Pouches & Secret Drawers

Date 2 December 2021, 1.00pm - 4 December 2021, 3.05pm Institute Institute of Modern Languages Research Type Seminar Venue Online Description The title of this conference refers to enclosed places, deception and privacy, focusing on three spatial areas – the body, clothing and furniture. For Baudelaire the weight of memories is like a desk full of hidden drawers; for Carroll the white rabbit’s pocket drives Alice down into Wonderland. Houses contain rooms, which contain furniture with secret contents; bodies enclose pouches, wombs, systems, membranes. All enclosures imply possible exposure but also protect themselves against revelation – why and how? Do boys’ pockets differ from girls’? Is a poacher’s coat, lined with hidden pockets, quite different from the mechanism by which drawers spring out of an eighteenth-century lady’s escritoire to carry when she travels? What is the ‘person’ that hides things about itself? This topic crosses many disciplinary boundaries as well as languages, centuries and media. The conference includes three keynote speakers, parallel sessions and a magic performance.

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