Critical Inquiry
Spring 1995
Volume 21, Number 3
Excerpt from "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance"
by Carrie Jaurès Noland:
"The fact that [Patti] Smith chose to focus her largely successful
1978 album Easter on Rimbaud points first to the great appeal
of his myth; Rimbaud, the countercultural rebel, provided young
musicians of the seventies with a persuasive model of antisocial
innocence. However, Smith's multiple allusions to Rimbaud's
text-- her appropriation of precise features of his style--
suggest thtat there was something she found nourishing in the poetry
itself. The case of the punk reception of Rimbaud (a reception that
occurred primarily through the mediation of Smith) demonstrates that
it was the linguistic strategies we associate with the lyric genre--
and not simply the myth of the French voyou (hooligan, punk)--
that inspired the work of both punk musicians and their avant-garde
predecessors, the dadaists of the late teens and the situationists of
the sixties. The situationists, a radical French movement of the 1960s
often cited as a primary influence on the formation of punk style,
understood their project to be in direct continuity with the history
and evolution of lyric strategies, strategies pushed to their furthest
and most disruptive extreme in the work of Rimbaud and the
surrealists. "Clearly," they wrote in 1958, "the principal domain we
are going to replace and fulfill [through action] is poetry."
In a formulatuion that would be decisive for the development of
punk style, the situationists suggested that the textual existence of
the poetic impulse did not realize the full potential of its radically
anti-institutional force, and that this potential could only be
"fulfilled" in the realm of concrete actions or "situations." While
claiming that art per se had been exhausted as an effective
counterforce to modern consumer society, Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman
maintained that the "discoveries of modern poetry" could provide a
blueprint for countercultural activity, especially, if not
exclusively, in arenas traditionally foreign to high culture.
Such a view, it seems, was held by Patti Smith and the punk musicians
she influenced as well. However, punk fans of Patti Smith and of
Malcolm McLaren's band the Sex Pistols-- a band many consider to be
the culmination of punk practices inaugurated by Smith-- may not have
known that the sound and style of the music they were listening to
owed a debt to the "discoveries of modern poetry." Such a debt to
combinatory techniques developed by high-cultural models was either
muffled or advertised, depending upon the diverse packaging strategies
of the musicians involved. While the music of the Sex Pistols would
maintain an attenuated relationship to the poetic tradition, Patti
Smith actually foregrounded her debt, referring directly to her major
poetic influence, Rimbaud, and participating in a hermeneutic activity
as she transformed Rimbaud's texts into her own..."
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