Names for Children

Abstract

In his essay, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire makes a general statement about the quality or qualities peculiar to the nature of superlative creators: `Le genie n'est que l'enfance retrouvee a volonte, l'enfance douee maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes virils et de l'esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de materiaux involontairement amassee.' (1) `L'enfance retrouvee a volonte': childhood rediscovered at will, but also, it seems, under the aegis of the will, the sovereign and inevitably adult principle of order. The exercise of one's genius, then, involves a retrospective and methodical appropriation of the childish state, to be coupled with and tempered by a necessary maturity, producing `un homme-enfant [...] un homme possedant a chaque minute le genie de l'enfance, c'est-a-dire un genie pour lequel aucun aspect de la vie n'est emoussee'. A more particular proposition is made, in the service of the new kind of draughtsmanship Baudelaire is keen to promote in parts of the essay, when a tendency in visual artists to abstraction and the erasure of detail in the service of l'ensemble is alleged to be `le resultat d'une perception enfantine'. Baudelaire's new draughtsmanship, it seems, is to be an art with a measure of artlessness: its childishness is elsewhere in the article connected with an appropriate barbarousness, which overlaps with the enfantine theme in a way that could be described as Rousseauesque, as the growth of the child into the man is the analogue for the evolution of man from the `savage' state into civilization. The child and the `savage' are both aboriginal, it is said, and their original innocence is not yet made corrupt by contact with the decrepitude and extravagance, the exhausting surfeit of fripperies that characterize civilization. Baudelaire clearly utilizes so-called primitive art, and so-called childish qualities, as examples, for the desired suppression of inessential minutiae in paintings, examples that represent an honesty, simplicity, and directness that precede the imposition of a received and decadent culture. At or near the beginning of the twentieth century, this sort of strategy will have become a straightforward and outspoken promotion and collection of children's art, by artists such as Kandinsky and Klee who argued for `pure elementary representation' (2) and against faithful reproduction, citing the supposed ability of young children to perceive with new eyes and thus to represent some ideal, general form of an object without being distracted by irrelevant idiosyncracies or by received models, though the stylistic conventions that seem to produce a certain uniformity in child art, the uniformity prized by its promoters as true and essential, might just as easily be viewed as utterly cultural, derivative. The recourse to the figure of `the child' as artistic exemplar is, of course, commonplace, a staple of any polemic that claims to be witnessing or willing the final collapse of a derelict order and the simultaneous birth of the new, and it can be shown to be just as persistent in milder and more reticent discourses. At or near the infancy of his poetic career, the work of the Scottish poet, W. S. Graham, owes an obvious and considerable debt to an English translation of the Illuminations, a set of prose-poems by Arthur Rimbaud. As is well known, Rimbaud's most productive spell as a poet took place between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, at which point he seems entirely to have given up any serious literary ambitions, and this startling biography has incited a host of artists, from virtually every discipline, to invoke him as the very principle of unmanageable adolescent revolt. From DADA and the Surrealists, to the novelist, William Burroughs, rock musicians such as Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, and the visual artist, Terry Atkinson, who secretly invented a persona that he named Rimbaud-Me when in revolt against his fellow members of the conceptual art grouping Art & Language, Rimbaud's posthumous career amounts to a long series of appropriations prompted by the iconicity of an `homme-enfant' whose literary radicality is all too easily reduced to a generalized, unprincipled delinquency. …