#'oh god that's an exact mirroring of the composition of this other shot in a show made like 20 years earlier!!!'

[tavina-writes]

CQL and Genre Intertextuality

I'm being bashed over the head with the "nhs's fan in CQL is made of xuantie/dark iron" thing again and @poorlittleyaoyao please understand that I am thinking of this constantly since you made that post talking about it because I'm just.

holding my head in my hands bc ye gods the cql show writers were genre savvy in ways that are hilarious but also make me feel like I've been hit upside the head with a waffle iron.

For those of us who are no longer damaged by the post or hadn't seen it (I don't actually know where it's gone bc the search feature doesn't work on this webbed site):

Xuantie/Dark Iron is a Jin Yong created metal that famously was used for the blade of the Dragon Slaying Sabre in the third novel of the Condor Trilogy, 倚天屠龍記/The Heavenly Sword and Dragon Saber.

The Heaven Reliant Sword 倚天劍 was created from Yang Guo and Xiao Longnv's Gentleman and Lady swords, whilst the Dragon Slaying Saber 屠龍刀 was created from Grandmaster Dugu Seeking-a-Loss's Dark Iron Sword.

Can we please all take a moment to appreciate how NHS's fan not his saber, NHS, from The Family With The Sabers, gets to shout about how his fan is made of xuantie. The most famous for being the metal that made up The Dragon Slaying Saber. His fan. Not his saber. his fan. dark iron. Dragon Slaying Saber. This is so funny I'm about to mcfucking lose it yet again while typing this.

Going back to Grandmaster Dugu Seeking-A-Loss (who appears in both Return of the Condor Heroes and Xiao Ao Jianghu) and his giant pet condor (sadly, only a ROCH feature) who might've been his one true soulmate for a second, this situation from episode 7, when the Yunmeng Siblings are leaving the Cloud Recesses:

Now, the subtitles here really DO NOT do this line justice because when I first saw it it took me FLAT THE FUCK OUT and I had to lie on the floor laughing for like, 80 seconds before I got my breath back.

Okay, what this line ACTUALLY says is "I am Dugu Qiubai (Grandmaster Dugu Seeking-A-Loss), what's wrong with seeking a match?"

Now, to understand this, we come to this backstory on Dugu Qiubai in XAJH:

“Senior master Dugu Seeking-A-Loss, who created this set of sword techniques, had a name ‘Seeking-A-Loss.’ He had been seeking a loss all his life and still couldn’t get one. Once the sword techniques were executed, he would become unmatched anywhere in the world. Why would he have to defend? If anyone could have forced him to draw his sword back and defend himself, the respectful master would have burst with joy and be delighted beyond measure.” Feng Qingyang said. “Dugu Seeking-A-Loss, Dugu Seeking-A-Loss,” Linghu Chong muttered as he imagined how the senior master had wandered about the Martial World, unmatched anywhere, with only his sword, and couldn’t even find a single one who was capable of forcing him into a defending stance. That was truly admirable.

from Chapter Ten of XAJH: Sword Training.

"If anyone could force him to draw his sword back to defend himself, the grandmaster would have burst with joy and be delighted beyond measure" DO YOU SEE WHY JC STARTED CALLING WWX SHAMELESS NOW. they're JUNIORS. WWX is calling himself "the greatest man of all, who'd sought the feeling of losing just ONCE being forced to defend himself just ONCE in a LIFETIME" and saying "LWJ might be my equal. my soulmate. the loss I was seeking my whole life."

All 15 years of it I'm sure, WWX.

I'm not going to get into finding martial arts manuals or a respected grandmaster who taught you incredible things in a cave bc 1) LHC and Feng Qingyang up there are sitting together, in a cave and LHC is being taught incredible things and 2) Duan Yu from Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils once found the magic finger lasers of ultra laser in a cave. In front of the statue of a goddess. (don't talk about the dancing goddess statue now, Tav. We don't have time for that in this post.)

Not kidding the intertextuality of CQL and how much it plays with and against the tropes of its genre, especially other wuxia tv adaptations as well as wuxia novels is insane. There's other ones I'm missing for certain and these were just the most funny to me, personally, but! just! oh my god! insane! insane! SO funny, so clever in so many ways

#meta #my meta #wei wuxian #nie huaisang #nie huaisang my beloved #I don't even know how to begin to explain how much this show and its show writers really KNOW its genre #there are certain shots where I'm like #'oh god that's an exact mirroring of the composition of this other shot in a show made like 20 years earlier!!!' #no cql doesn't know what a pacing is and there's four episodes of guanyin temple #but my god do these people who made this show really love wuxia and it really really shows #and that's lovely I'm so happy about it

[rururinchan]

Fall of the Champions (Part 1)

@paladinsheadcanons 

Heya! Finally posting part one of that fic following the Seris teaser. It’s pretty much 100% angst, and Zhin-centric, and after that I’m taking a break from writing Zhin (hey mods if you have anyone you want me to write for let me know :D).

Okay anyway...this ended up waaay too long so I had no choice but to split it up...on the bright side, SUSPENSE. :3 Have fun reading my favourite mods. (Seriously though don’t hate me after this.)

Fire was everywhere. Smoke and embers filled the air around them. The buildings of the Paladins base had been reduced to nothing but rubble, destroyed by the onslaught of explosions that no one had been able to see coming.

Zhin was on the run, Sha Lin and Ying behind him, as they dodged the army of armored soldiers that had charged their way into the main base, tearing everything they could apart, shooting and burning everything else. It had been nothing less than devastating, and as much as Zhin wanted to fight back, to get revenge on those bastards that dared to attack the place he had come to accept as a home, he knew it would be suicide to fight. They had no choice but to run.

It had been a simple evening, everyone just gathering to celebrate Zhin’s first full year of being a Paladin. Nobody had expected an attack of any sort.

Everyone had split up after the attack started, Skye giving them all cover as they left the main building with her Smoke Bombs, fortunately without their usual match limitations. They'd agreed to take the hidden flank routes throughout the base to get to their emergency bunker in the woods not far from the base, but without the time to properly plan any sort of group compositions though, it was far too likely that their groups were completely unbalanced and vulnerable. Zhin, unfortunately, found himself in that exact situation. As much as he cared for both Sha Lin and Ying, the three of them were amongst the worst Paladins to be caught in a swarm of enemies. They had to make sure to avoid any such fight if possible.

“Come on, this way!” Zhin whispered urgently as they hurried from corner to corner, Zhin silently praying to the gods that they wouldn't be found. He led the two into a small corridor of one of the few remaining, smaller buildings left in the area, taking them through a narrow passageway.

“Doesn't this lead right to the open arena? That place is too open, we'll be too exposed if we go there!” Sha Lin questioned, his voice slightly shaking. His panic was obvious, and Zhin could also see that while Ying said nothing, the way she was holding her mirror close to her chest, a defensive habit she always seemed to have, was enough proof that she felt the same as Sha Lin did. Zhin grunted in frustration, unable to think of anything to say to quell their concerns.

“There is another passage Skye and I often use along there.” He told them instead, “It leads directly to the woods, and it’s the route the others would most likely take as well. If we make it past the arena area we'll be able to reach it and escape, as well as hopefully meet up with the rest.”

“Zhin that's a really risky move. Are you sure about this?” Sha Lin asked, the uncertainty in his eyes clear as day. Zhin frowned, part of him wanting to yell at Sha Lin for not trusting him, but he controlled himself.

“I've taken this route often and know the way through and through. We can make it if we're fast enough.” He answered with a slight grunt. Sha Lin frowned now, still looking horribly unsure, but before he could say anything Ying spoke.

“Please, we have to try. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we can rejoin our friends and find a way to fight back.” She said, a determined glint in her eyes despite her evident uncertainty from earlier. Sha Lin looked at her, his doubt still clearly present in his expression, but after a moment, he sighed and turned back to Zhin.

“Okay, let’s go then.” He said. Zhin nodded, and all three of them readied their weapons just in case they did end up needing to fight back instantly.

They reached the end of the passageway within a minute, and Zhin carefully approached the door. He could hear the sounds of the battle raging on outside, and he felt his stomach turn when he realized how similar the sounds of destruction had been during his time as the Master of the Thousand Hands. A sense of guilt and shame washed over him, but now wasn't the time for that.

“Are you ready?” He asked the two behind him. He noticed Sha Lin gripping his bow tighter, and Ying’s floating mirror trembling ever so slightly, but neither of them let the fear show on their faces anymore, giving Zhin a firm nod each.

“Very well. Do not fall back. Just keep moving and follow me.” Zhin instructed, receiving more nods of acknowledgement in response. With that clear, Zhin took a deep breath, and threw open the door.

Without wasting a second Zhin rushed out of the passageway and into the midst of a fearsome battle. There seemed to be hundreds of soldiers, all wielding a variety of deadly weapons, dressed head to toe in brilliant red and gold armor. Zhin’s blood went icy cold. He knew those colours. He knew who was attacking.

“Move!” Zhin hissed, urging them to move faster. Now that he knew who the army belonged to, he knew more than ever that they had to escape no matter what. However, that was when things truly went wrong.

“THERE HE IS!” One of the soldiers suddenly screamed, “THERE’S THE TYRANT!”

A thunderous wave of battle cries rang out, and all at once, it seemed like every soldier in the vicinity came rushing at them.

“Oh no!” Ying exclaimed as they continued to run, now desperate to reach their destination, but with the sheer number of soldiers present, it seemed impossible to escape.

Then...a familiar voice rang out.

“Good Night~!”

Darkness fell over everything as Midnight engulfed the battlefield, even around Zhin’s group. Wherever Maeve was, she must’ve been close. Before Zhin could call out though, two more Ultimate calls were heard.

“Bringing out the big guns!”

“Here’s the wind-up!”

The sound of Ruckus and Bolt’s powerful Hexafire was unmistakable. Cries of agony from the enemy forces were heard, and amongst those sounds Zhin would hear the fierce firing of Buck’s Buck Wild Ultimate as well. They were pushing back the soldiers greatly, and, intentionally or not, giving Zhin’s group an opening to escape.

“Hurry, now’s our chance!” Zhin yelled at Sha Lin and Ying, running forward.

“W-Wait! What about Ruckus and Buck!?” Ying called, following behind but still looking over in the direction of the sounds of heavy machine gun fire.

“We can’t take jump into that Ying! We have to…!” Sha Lin was shouting back, but just in that moment, the darkness cleared. In his shock, Zhin looked back at the battle, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw Buck make a fatal mistake, using Heroic Leap straight into the air just as Maeve’s Midnight ended.

“Buck! NOOO!” Ying screamed as Buck was quickly shot down from the air, his cry of pain instantly silenced when he hit the ground with a sickening thud, unmoving and bleeding heavily.

“NO!” Sha Lin exclaimed as well, and both of them immediately tried to run for him, but Zhin seized Sha Lin by the arm, his other hand unfortunately still occupied with his sword, rendering him unable to hold Ying back as well.

“You can’t! It’s too dangerous!” He yelled, yanking a struggling Sha Lin back, “Ying! YING COME BACK!”

His calls seemed to fall on deaf ears. Ying dashed into the fight, placing Illusion after Illusion and shattering them all immediately, shooting anyone else in her path as she tried to make it to Buck’s fallen form, but she wasn’t able to do much on her own. Even with Ruckus and Bolt there providing her cover fire, there were too many soldiers for her to take on, even after their allies’ Ultimates massacred the majority of them.

Zhin cursed, releasing Sha Lin and rushing after her himself using Whirl, refusing to let Ying die as well. With the number of soldiers drastically decreased, they might have a chance of escape if he got her out in time. Sha Lin had Withdrawn, going into stealth, and only the few random bodies dropping dead from unseen arrows gave any indication of his location.

“Time to die Tyrant!” Someone shouted behind Zhin all of a sudden, and Zhin turned quickly, immediately activating Billow to avoid a strike from a soldier wielding a massive broadsword. The force of the blow was enough to crack the stone floors of the arena, an Zhin cursed internally at how close he came to being brutally cut in half.

The soldier was far from done though. With a war cry, he chased after Zhin as he tried to fall back, raising his weapon again as Billow faded out. But before he could strike, the soldier was tackled with the full force of Ruckus’s Advance.

“Take that ya whackjob!” Ruckus yelled as Bolt rapidly shot at point-blank range. The soldier dropped dead at once, and Zhin quickly shouted a thanks at the duo, before he turned back towards Ying, who was now using Dimensional Link over and over in a frantic attempt to avoid the gunfire, but her movements had gotten predictable.

“Ying!” Zhin exclaimed as he forced his legs to run, wildly slashing at anything in his way, “Ying get out of there!”

His warning was futile. One soldier dashed to one of Ying’s remaining Illusions, and the moment she teleported over, the soldier fired her gun.

“YING!!” Zhin shouted, fury and horror building in him as he watched the bullet pierce through the corner of Ying’s mirror, and Ying let out a piercing scream of pain as the glass on her vessel cracked.

“HAA!!” Zhin charged at the soldier with Spite, letting his rage take over for a brief moment, as his Ultimate decimated the soldier's form. Maeve Prowled into sight, covered in blood, her eyes wild as she ran straight for Ying, who had collapsed.

“Ying! Ying no!” Maeve cried as she dropped to Ying’s side. Ying was fortunately still alive, but even from a distance Zhin could see that her form was distorted, and parts of her body had cracked like her mirror.

“Let's get you out of here!” Maeve exclaimed as Zhin watched her quickly snatch up Ying’s damaged mirror and Ying herself, before dragging her to who knows where. Zhin grunted as he turned his attention back to the fight, knowing that if anyone could find an escape it was Maeve. He had to trust that she would get Ying to safety.

“You will all pay for what you've done!” Zhin declared, ignoring the small voice in his mind telling him to retreat. These soldiers had crossed the line. Zhin was going to make sure it cost them.

More death to come. ;)

#paladins champions of the realm #paladins #paladins fic #zhin #angst #dont kill me #my writing

[3-leggeddog-blog]

Arthur Rimbaud Essay

The Indivisible Life and Poetry of Arthur Rimbaud

““Beware biography,” critics had told me,” says Paul Schmidt in his introduction to Rimbaud’s Complete Works before punctuating its final paragraph with the query, “Yes—but whose?” (Schmidt xiv). It is not difficult for the adolescent romantic to fall wildly in love with the poetry and life of Arthur Rimbaud. With a life so rich with romanticist turbulence it becomes quite almost entirely impossible to, as Roland Barthes says, detach the “person” of the author—the biography—from the work of the author in the case of Rimbaud. Surrounding the French symbolist poet is an aura of myth, cause of his wild, adventurous life. When reading Rimbaud it seems impossible to detach the life from the work; Rimbaud’s largest advertisement is his infamous biographical reputation. In fact, writers have historically found such an intimate kinship with the poet that translations, biographies, and collections of his work are almost guaranteed to include an “inevitable prefatory remark, on the part of the translator or biographer, about the moment when he or she first discovered the poet” (Mendelsohn). This is because more than most poets, the life of Rimbaud surrounds his work as much or perhaps more than it penetrates it. But adulating future writers are not the only ones involved in the partnership between Rimbaud’s life and work, the poet himself is equally responsible, inserting himself into his work often, honestly, and shamelessly.

One wonders that with such an infamous wealth of biographical details can one truly read Rimbaud without getting carried away with the distractions these details pose? His life indeed informed his work. His poetic philosophy found its way into his letters, and was fearlessly expressed in his life actions. What would the reader think of Rimbaud if they were to discover he never ran away from home, drank to excess wine, liquor, absinthe, smoked hashish and opium, never became involved in a homosexual extra-marital affair with Paul Verlaine, was never famously shot by Verlaine, never schizophrenically bounced between Brussels, London, and Paris, never quit poetry at nineteen, became a soldier and subsequent deserter of the Dutch Colonial army, disappearing into the Indian jungle, and reappearing as an arms merchant in Abssynia? Schmidt recalls the impossibility of this schism between biography and writing: “It became clear to me that the writing itself was his life, the clear set of objective facts we call biography” (Schmidt xiv).

Translator Paul Schmidt recounts his own quintessential adolescent experience discovering Rimbaud: “My own adolescence was swallowed up in the new one his poems revealed to me” (Schmidt xiv). Schmidt’s nostalgic introduction is tradition among “many of the translations and biographies of Rimbaud” (Mendelsohn 5).

Although missing the adolescent mark by about 15 years, author Henry Miller—keep in mind his reputation of exception—was “thirty six years old” when he discovered Rimbaud “in 1927, in the sunken basement of a dingy house in Brooklyn” (Miller 24). Similarly to the experiences of other writers mentioned earlier, Miller, who was “in the depths of my own protracted Season in Hell,” recalls a significant self-identification with Rimbaud upon first discovery, going on to divide his writing career into sections parallel to Rimbaud’s: “If that period in Brooklyn represented my Season in Hell, then the Paris period, especially from 1932 to 1934, was the period of my Illuminations” (Miller 23). While Miller “had yet to read a line of biography,” when he did he was “overwhelmed, tongue-tied. It seemed to me that I had never read of a more accurses existence than Rimbaud’s” (Miller 23). Singer and poet Patti Smith recollects: “When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes in an introduction to “The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry,” “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” The anthology, she adds, “became the bible of my life,” further providing an example of youth seduced by the poetry and life of Rimbaud.

Mendelsohn poses glibly that “depending on your view of human nature, either everything or nothing about Rimbaud’s drab origins explains what came later” (Mendelsohn, Rebel Rebel). He goes on however, to explain precisely how logical it is to presume Rimbaud’s work was heavily inspired by the scenes of his upbringing.

“When Arthur was five, his father went off to join his regiment and never came back. The memory of the abandonment haunts Rimbaud’s work, which often evokes lost childhood happiness, and occasionally seems to refer directly to his family’s crisis. (She, / all black and cold, hurries after the man’s departure!”)

So how complicit is Rimbaud in the phenomenon of the inseparable relationship between his life and work? It is significant to view the poetry of his youth, as to ascertain the gravity of intimacy felt by youthful writers discovering Rimbaud’s work and biography simultaneously.

At the age of ten writings of Rimbaud prove evident of his future artistry, but they also include his characteristic “self-awareness”. While already difficult for Rimbaud fans to detach the ‘person’ of the Author from the work, Rimbaud readily inserts his biography into his poetry. Perhaps it is even predictable for the poet to start so young and so well to have burnt out by nineteen, as Verlaine suggested as the reasoning behind Rimbaud’s abandonment of poetry. In fact, Rimbaud’s defining artistic trademark may be his “overwhelming consciousness of himself as a poet” evident in his poetry in his ten year old conception, and following him n 16 year old letters to poet friends in Paris until his abandonment of not only poetry itself but himself as a poet.

In a composition titled “Prologue” decade old Rimbaud relates a dream sequence: “I dreamed that…I had been born in Rheims, in the year 1503” (5, Complete Works). The parents Rimbaud describes he had in his dream appear extremely reminiscent of his own: “My parents were not rich, but very respectable,” in which his “father was an officer,” and his mother “a sweet, quiet woman, upset at very little, and yet maintaining perfect order in the house” (5, Complete Works). “Prologue” continues as a kind of predictive meditation of Rimbaud’s famous rebelliousness—“Why—I used to ask myself—learn Greek and Latin? I don’t know. After all, nobody needs it,” and self prophecizing “what do I care if I get promoted…Oh, yes; they say you can’t get a job if you don’t get promoted. But I don’t want a job; I’m going to be a rich man” (6 Complete Works). The ten year old curses: “Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn! Damn!” declaring “it’s no good wearing out the seat of your pants in school, for godsakes!” and deriding society, lamenting, “to get a job shining shoes, you have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs,” abandoning the prospect of a conventional adulthood, “Thank God, I don’t want any of that! Besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it’s not true, a little kid, etc….” (7 Complete Works). The young poet punctuates “Prologue” with five more damns, signing: “To Be Continued, Arthur, Age 10”.

This sentiment is mirrored in a letter sent in 1871 to Georges Izambard in which Rimbaud chastises him for his “wishy-washy” poetry and for being “in the rut” of the “University trough.” Rimbaud continues on to echo “Prologue”: “That’s what holds me back when a wild fury drives me toward the battle in Paris, where so many workers are still dying while I am writing to you! Work now? Never, never. I’m on strike.” Here is clearly Rimbaud’s trademark relentless dedication to transgression and subversion. But the common thread is more of how clearly and passionately and precisely Rimbaud has laid out the architecture of his future, it is his “overwhelming self-consciousness” of his poetic identity. It is where Rimbaud plainly rejects the Barthes approved “poetics” of Mallarme which “consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing” (Barthes 3). Rather, Rimbaud does the exact opposite, declaring that he was “born a poet. And I have realized that I am a poet,” but does not take responsibility: “It’s not my doing at all.” He continues in this letter to describe his poetic philosophy: “Right now, I’m depraving myself as much as I can. Why?  I want to be a poet, and I am working at making myself a visionary: you won’t understand at all, and I’m not even sure can explain it to you. The problem is to attain the unknown by disorganizing all the senses” (Complete Works 113).

Does Rimbaud’s extreme poetic self-awareness find its way into his poetry autobiographically? How much so does Rimbaud contribute to his biographical legacy in his biography? Arthur Symons argues that this nature of Rimbaud’s personality was the “reason why he was able to do the unique thing in literature he did, and then to disappear quietly and become a legend in the East,” is because Rimbaud “had not the mind of the artist but of the man of action” (Symon 12). Of course it is easiest to read A Season in Hell under the assumption of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine, or the epic prose-poem’s opening line as an obvious recall to his raucous times in Paris. But in an earlier poem, “Seven-Year-Old Poets”, Rimbaud obviously speaks of himself, and relates himself to other young poets of his disposition. The poem begins, “The Mother closed the copybook, and went away/Content, and very proud, and never saw/In the blue eyes, beneath the pimply forehead, the horror and loathing in her child’s soul.” (Complete Works 86). Rimbaud describes the boy as “very bright,” but with “some traits” which “seemed to shadow sour hypocrisies”—running back to his mother continually in life. The young boy also already possesses the self-induced visionary intentional disorganization of the senses, “shut[ting] his eyes to see spots,” and hanging out in “the cool latrine: there he could think, be calm, and sniff the air,” and “squeezing his dazzled eyes to make visions come.” The precocious boy of seven “made up novels: life in the desert, liberty in transports gleaming,” prophesizing Rimbaud’s time in the Middle East, getting there via riding ships as a stowaway. Of course, present in the poem is also Rimbaud’s characteristic sexual hedonisms, the boy cantankers with a young female and “bites her ass because she wore no panties underneath,” the boy “hated God, but loved the men he saw.” The poems ends with another vision of Rimbaud’s post-adolescent, post-poetry future, with the boy reading “while the noises of the neighborhood swelled below—stretched out alone on unbleached canvas sheets” the boy sees “a turbulent vision of sails!” (88 Complete Works).

A classic Rimbaud poem details his rape by French soldiers he encountered on foot travel during one of his famous runaway to Paris endeavors. His escape from his family and home was of utmost importance to Rimbaud, whose biography—absent of runaway endeavours—would similarly be found that in his work, would be absent of some of his most iconic poems. Mendelsohn explains:

“Certainly the teen-rebel phase that began when he was around fifteen looks like a reaction to life with Vitalie. The frenetic pursuit of what, in one letter, he called “free freedom” runs like a leitmotif through Rimbaud’s life: few poets have walked, run, ridden, or sailed as frequently or as far as he did. Late in the summer of 1870, a couple of months before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away from Vitalie’s dour home and took a train to Paris: the first of many escapes. Since he didn’t have enough money for the full fare, he was arrested and jailed on his arrival and, after writing a plaintive letter to a beloved teacher back in Charleville, Georges Izambard (and not, as far as we know, one to his mother), he was bailed out and slunk back home. The pattern of flight and return would recur up until his final return, a few months before his death.”

It is not only Rimbaud’s magical biography disentaglable from his poetry—which could hardly fill two volumes—it’s that his life story has been reappropriated by disenfranchised youth so enchanted with the romantics of his life. Ruth Franklin, Rimbaud biographer, tell us: “the poetry ranges from inspired to truly puerile; many of the letters contain outright lies, while others are fragmented or of dubious authenticity…. In the words of the biographer Graham Robb, he [Rimbaud] has been resurrected as “Symbolist, Surrealist, Beat poet, student revolutionary, rock lyricist, gay pioneer, and inspired drug-user,” and invoked by artists from Picasso to Jim Morrison.

           Perhaps the greatest providence in the case of Rimbaud’s exceptionality to Barthes’ rule is when Barthes echoes a famously Rimbaud sentiment, saying: “just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a “subject,” and not a “person” (Barthes 3). Here Barthes explains perfectly the reappropriation of Rimbaud’s identity—“person”—into myth—“subject”. Which perfectly coincides with the point made above by Ruth Franklin and Graham Robb.

One must ask, however, if it is possible to detach the poet’s work from his life, is it further yet, possible—or wise—to demystify the life of Rimbaud? Paul Schmidt reveals the unreliable recollections of Rimbaud’s “early biographers,” stating:

“…his high school teacher Georges Izambard, his friend Ernest Delahaye, his sister Isabelle and her husband Paterne Berrichon. They were all clearly writing reports in retrospect, reminiscences of a familiar and therefore largely unperceived individual who had become suddenly famous; with the best wills in the world, they all had axes to grind: Izambard had to justify his inability to recognize in his pupil a great poet of the nineteenth century; Delahaye had to prove himself an intellectual intimate of a great poet, without too much incriminating himself in some of the more sordid experiences of the poet’s life; Isabelle, a woman of somewhat hysterical comportment, to judge by her letters, was concerned to present the great poet as a good Catholic and a credit to a bourgeois family; while Berrichon corrected the great poet’s grammar and his public figure in general” (Schmidt xix).

Daniel Mendersohn also takes a jab at demystifying the romantic idealism surrounding

the biography of Rimbaud by revealing the contradictions inherent in his life:

“He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his home town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”

But what happens with an illumination of Rimbaud’s philosophic compromises and recurring paradoxes does not deromanticize the poet’s biography. On the contrary, the poet’s ambivalence and impulsivity only add to the milieu of esoterica surrounding his legend. Mendelsohn admits “these paradoxes, and the extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay that Rimbaud’s story can evoke, are at the center of a powerful mystique that has seduced readers from Marcel Proust to Patti Smith.” (Mendelsohn Rebel Rebel).

While the timing of Illuminations is famously ambiguous, it is widely read as Rimbaud’s abandonment of poetry, or his eulogy to that life. However, the title of the collection, or the arrangement of the collection itself is derivative of Rimbaud’s disorganization of the poems but was collected, curated, and titled by his former lover Paul Verlaine. What haunts both the biography and the poetry, is Rimbaud’s life decision to abandon poetry, deducibly in search to live more life. After Rimbaud quits poetry the rebellious tropes of his adolescence become adult adventures. While one’s adolescent discovery of Rimbaud could be classified as a decisive teenage experience, do we outgrow Rimbaud as Rimbaud outgrew poetry? Mendelsohn attests that, sadly, it is likely so.

“I suspect that the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him. I recently did an informal survey among some well-read acquaintances, and the e-mail I received from a ninety-year-old friend fairly sums up the consensus. “I loved Rimbaud poems when I read the Norman Cameron translations in 1942,” she wrote—Cameron’s translation, my favorite, too, is among the very few in English that try to reproduce Rimbaud’s rhymes—but she added, “I have quite lost what it was that so thrilled me.” In 1942, my friend was twenty-one. I was twice that age when I first started to read Rimbaud seriously, and, although I found much that dazzled and impressed me, I couldn’t get swept away��couldn’t feel those feelings again, the urgency, the orneriness, the rebellion.”

           Here Rimbaud directly transcends the rules imposed by Barthes in Death of The Author which says: “To give an author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification to close to the writing” (Barthes 5). As proved by the quote above and other instances of young writers, since Rimbaud loses a sense of magic as time passes proves that Rimbaud finds himself in the category “imposed upon” by a “stop clause” because when his biography no longer is so easily attached to his work by the reader in terms of adolescent relatability it changes, becomes, as Barthes says, “closed” (Barthes 5).

Miller too echoes the adult disillusionment with Rimbaud Mendelsohn raises: “It is only now, eighteen years after I first heard the name, that I am able to see him clearly, to read him like a clairvoyant” (Miller 24). To add my own experience to the canon of how aging refracts one’s feelings about Rimbaud, I discovered the poetry of Rimbaud at fifteen, and I recall how easily the visceral energy breathed from his poems, and I recall the detailed biography an enthralling and endless piece of esoterica. And already, four years later, I know what these writers mean when they admit the disenchantment they feel upon aging with Rimbaud.  “Rimbaud was a dreamer, but all of his dreams were discoveries.” Once Rimbaud is discovered, is it then easy to exhaust him? Is it, perhaps, the combination of the disillusionment inherent in aging with his small quantity or work? Or is present literary youth culture so saturated with his image and his name and his work and his biography that we discover Rimbaud younger and exhaust him faster? Hopefully the instances of occasional rediscovery will capture at least an essence of the primal sensations of discovering Rimbaud in the dizzy of adolescence.

           In the case of Rimbaud the Author does not have to die for his writing to live, rather, the longer and more viscerally he lives in the reader’s conscience, the better. In conclusion it is impossible to detach Rimbaud’s life from his work as it is so romantically seductive to the literary adolescent or upstart. However, with age, the magic of adolescence fades and our perception of Rimbaud shifts from a standpoint in which our individual lives cease to connect with the poetry of Rimbaud age-wise. But the author’s biography, so entrenched in our mentality and nostalgia, will never cease to pervade—if not our current disposition—the charms of our memory.

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