At the beginning of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit), we find ourselves in a drawing room in Second Empire style. The title, Huis Clos, is an idiomatic expression literally meaning something like ‘shut door’, used in the French legal system to mean hearings held in private, or as we say in jurisprudence, ‘in camera’. The fact that ‘huis clos’ is basically a legal term is appropriate for the play, because its three main characters have been judged; they are in Hell, sentenced to spend eternity in a room they will never be able to leave. But why are our three characters, emblematic of different possibilities of our humanity, in Hell?

‘Some do. Some don’t’. The ‘getting used to it’ is the kind of lowest-common denominator survival reflex of the human being and their attendant condition, the tragic fate of the mass of humankind for Sartre. If humanity is indeed in an everyday Hell, ‘in time’ our everyday temporal condition, then here it seems to be something freely chosen, a consequence of our very own actions. But such a Hell is hardly a Utopia, quite the opposite, it is our living nightmare. So why would we choose such a fate for ourselves? In this context, it is clear that the dramatization of Hell has different and conflicting meanings in the play and that part of Sartre’s intention is to put into relief some of these opposed meanings, which will also show up some of our self-conflicts as human beings (sometimes a self-alienation or a self against itself) as well as our disagreements and alienation from others.

In this essay, I will use this Sartrean set of existential and ethical dilemmas as a foundation to explore how a related ambiguous and polysemic conceptualisation of ‘Hell’ is at the heart of two separate and distinctive poetics. First, that of the late nineteenth century French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and, second, that of the punk writer, musician and poet Richard Hell. Hell (originally Richard Meyers from Delaware) actually takes his stage name from Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer or A Season in Hell (while to complete the circle, Rimbaud’s vision is a direct influence on Sartre’s theatre).

‘Where’s the torture chamber? That’s the first thing they ask, all of them’ (Sartre 1990). In Huis Clos, we are first presented with the standard picture of Hell, as a (Christian theological) place where humans are sent as a punishment for their sins, and tortured according to their just deserts. Even for the nonChristian (such as Sartre, and me) this conceptualisation of Hell, we might say, has become hegemonic in the culture. But this theatre piece presents us with a different picture. ‘Garcin: Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is . . . other people [‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’]’ (Sartre 1990).

The translation of this existentialist principle into English is ambiguous, a polysemy that captures some of Sartre’s provocation to thought in the text. The most common translation of the statement is as ‘Hell is Other People’ (for example, in Sartre 1990). This suggests the characters are blaming other people for their predicament. We are in Hell because of others, because of their choices, their negative impact on our lives. While there is a power in this reading, it needs to be contextualised. If we look at each of the characters, we can see that they are in Hell for different reasons. Garcin admits that he ’tortured’ his wife, not physically but emotionally, with enjoyment and without remorse. Inez describes how she broke up a marriage so she could gain access to the wife (Inez is a lesbian). Estelle acknowledges that she murdered her baby, not wanting it to clutter up her life, and thereby caused her lover’s suicide.

Each of these characters would clearly rather blame the Other for their punishment and the judgement on their lives, but Sartre’s background stories exemplify that there is a deep personal responsibility for the mess each person has made of their lives (as well as the ruination of others). We construct a Hell for ourselves, Sartre seems to be suggesting, when we refuse to take responsibility for our own actions and their wide-ranging consequences.

We might rephrase the principle thus – ‘L’enfer, c’est moi’, ‘Hell, it’s me’. Although the centrality of the ‘Hell is Other People’ principle in Huis Clos may also be an indication that the judgement of others is crucial here. My own Hell may be exacerbated by the realisation that the other’s judgement of my behaviour is damning. The three characters of the play – Inez, Garcin and Estelle – are all presented as narcissistic and selfish, but Hell has no mirrors, which perturbs them. This means they must rely on how others see them, as their own self-image and self-knowledge is no longer the criterion of identity. In this we might say that they are damned to be judged by others; another meaning of ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’.

Several decades before, Arthur Rimbaud as a young teenage poet of tortured genius was grappling with a similar set of dilemmas to Sartre, but as played out in poetry. Rimbaud’s seminal A Season in Hell effectively condemns Poetry (lyric and Romantic poetry) to Hell. ‘One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees. – And I found her bitter. – And I insulted her . . . I managed to make all human hope vanish from my mind’ (Rimbaud 1998). This text will seem to bring literature and poetry to its very knees, declaring a rhapsodic repudiation of poetics. After publication in 1873, Rimbaud will never publish again (although his last text Illuminations will be published by Verlaine). In the same way we ask of Sartre’s characters, what have they done to be in Hell, we can also ask of Rimbaud. What has poetry done to deserve such a judgement and such a punishment?

As Mark Treharne notes, ‘We can read A Season in Hell as an acutely agonised dramatization of the modern poet’s situation, of the nature of his/her function in the world, of the function of poetry in what had developed into an industrial and consumer society in nineteenth-century France’ (Treharne 1998). Lyric poetry and Romanticism as a very idea seem to have been tortured to death by contemporary materialism and tawdry capitalism. But in the same way that Inez, Garcin and Estelle seek to blame others and the world for their misfortune (while in actuality being responsible for their own sorry fate), so too with poetry. Rimbaud, in this extraordinary and wholly original text, dramatizes and performs a poetics and a Poetry now totally at odds with itself, self-flagellating, expressing simultaneous self-remorse and blame of the Other.

This is not just a question of literary or semantic content but more importantly of form. A Season in Hell radicalises the form of poetry, transgressing traditional metre and limits, and standards of what should and should not be said, often in a brazen manner (Rimbaud 1998). Stylistically, Rimbaud renders this crisis of poetry in an idiosyncratic use of syntax, employing odd punctuation, exclamation and question-marks and the use of the dash (much like the Japanese haiku). Additionally, his work paradigmatically moves away from the verse form to the form of the ‘prose poem’, allowing for a more diverse and plurivocal discourse to be put into play. Each of the micro-textual strategies suggests tonal shifts of hesitation, mood-reversal, sudden switches in perspective, pregnant silences and then more dramatically departures into irony, sarcasm, irrational outburst and anguished outcry (Treharne 1998). A Season in Hell often reads and sounds (as it calls out for performance) like a wild punk album from a full century later on.

My health became endangered. Terror was imminent. I fell into sleep for days at a time, and when I awoke the saddest dreams persisted. I was ripe for death, and my weakness led me down dangerous paths to the ends of the earth, to the borders of Cimmeria, the home of shadow and whirlwinds. (Rimbaud 1998).

Cimmeria was the name that classical antiquity gave to the remotest ends of the earth, a land shrouded in darkness and close to the kingdom of the dead. Everything is in the detail here, and we should note that Poetry is being brought ‘close to’ the kingdom of death here, but not exactly there. And yet the text finishes with a text entitled ‘Adieu’ to ‘outmoded ideas of poetry’ – ‘Autumn so soon! –’. Clearly, for Rimbaud and for Poetry, the summer is over.

If we can say that Rimbaud’s poetry is a ‘series of mood pictures’ of the expulsion of Poetry itself to Hell (Treharne 1998), we can say that an analogous mood of fraught pain and anxiety (alongside a mode of delirious lightness) is dramatized in a later related aesthetic, that of the punk writer, musician and poet Richard Hell. Hell (originally Richard Meyers from Delaware) actually takes his stage name from Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer or A Season in Hell. Although Hell is much better known as a singer and musician, whether as part of the original band Television, or (with the wondrous Johnny Thunders) The Heartbreakers or even with his own Voidoids (all seminal groups in their own distinctive manner), his main preoccupation and self-definition is as a writer and poet. Hell actually published a book of poems, entitled Wanna Go Out? in 1973, co-writing with Television’s paradigmatic aesthete singer Tom Verlaine. However, Hell left (or was kicked out) of Television at the beginning of 1975.

In 1884, Paul Verlaine coined the term ‘Les Poètes maudit’, or ‘The Damned Poets’, in reference to a group of French poets (including himself and his sometime lover, Rimbaud) who were social outcasts and largely ignored by critics (Note 1, below). In looking back at the genealogy of his own inspiration, Hell cites these French ‘damned’ poets as his main inspiration, Arthur Rimbaud most especially. From Arthur to Richard, then, a direct lineage seems to evolve. In this, he makes a similar point to Véronique Lane (Lane 2017) who, in her text The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation, cites Rimbaud and Symbolist poetry more generally as the most important influence on the American literature of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. For several years, Hell actually lived in the same East Side apartment block in New York as Ginsberg, often meeting him on the stairs. I captured this juxtaposition in a haiku included in the August 2024 issue of Red Ogre Review:

Hell met Ginsberg
On the LES tenement stairs
Tripped broken rodent steps

(Irwin 2024a).

Hell’s early poetry similarly takes liberties with poetic convention and decorum, often with a ribald humour. In his shared collection with Tom Verlaine from 1973, Wanna Go Out?, he pours scorn on the usual romantic concepts, most particularly the ideal of love: ‘I loved him so much / but I accidentally dropped an electric toothbrush / into my cunt / and fried his Johnson’ (Theresa Stern / Richard Hell 1973). This is rather hilarious if also destructive of romantic naivety, but if there was a time break for canned laughter in this essay, it would be right here [laughter emoji!!]. The very name of the band itself, invented as a neologism, has come to stand independently for ‘voidoid: someone who or something that has no meaning or purpose in life’.

Nonetheless, Hell’s work also has a more serious and philosophical side. Hell’s much avowed nihilism, identified as epoch-making in his Blank Generation song and lyrics, can be misleading in terms of his overall aesthetic and ethical vision of life. As Cynthia Rose has noted perceptively, ‘His acute awareness [of] the spiritual impoverishment of today’s world belies (he might prefer betrays) his passionate and romantic notions about [what] that world is’ (Rose 1983).

As his song ‘Betrayal’ has it, written like a haiku, ‘Betrayal takes two/who did it to who?’ (Hell and the Voidoids 1977). As with Rimbaud (and indeed Sartre), it is this duality of intense critique, with shards of possibility for humanity taking ethical responsibility for its own actions, which creates such a deconstructive art and poetics. Idealism is the relentless target, mercilessly mocked and cauterised. Hell’s original punk work is most powerfully captured in his album with The Voidoids, entitled Blank Generation. Musically and lyrically, this album is a coruscating experience. The music journalist Nick Kent refers to the album as ‘white noise kineticism’.

But although often read as a pure cynicism, Hell has made clear retrospectively that his intentions were aesthetic and ethical ones of commitment and engagement. This reminds one of Laurence Ferlinghetti’s famous statement against William Burroughs’ boast (‘only the dead and the junkie don’t care’) that rather, to the contrary, the poet and the artist should and must care: ‘Because Jean-Paul Sartre cares and has always hollered that the writer should especially be committed…Only the dead are disengaged’ (Ferlinghetti 1960). Hell has acknowledged that some of his apologetics for the album’s meaning were somewhat hypocritical (telling Lester Bangs that it was about ‘reinventing the self’) in that the album and the poetics were quite genuinely ones of ‘hopelessness. I was saying let me out of here before I was even born’ (quoted Love 2022).

The same Uncut Special (Love 2022) on his previous band Television has the front cover of the Voidoids album with Hell naked from the waist up and the slogan ‘You Make Me’ scrawled in marker across his bare chest. We might draw a comparison to the original discussion concerning Sartre and Huis Clos. One reading of this album then might draw a similar interpretation to our rendering of the principle of ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’ as ‘Hell is . . . other people’ (Sartre 1990). Richard Hell is in Hell, because of Other People – You Make Me! If this was the case Hell’s nihilism would be a blaming of others for his meaninglessness, for the futility of the world around him, this very blank generation. Certainly, there is a dimension of his work which speaks to this, which seems to revel in such a reductio ad absurdum.

And yet, as with Sartre and indeed even Rimbaud, another rendering of Hell is also possible. Here the principle of ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’ becomes associated with the narcissism and desperation which we see in Huis Clos, depicted in the figures of Garcin et al. But such desperate existential plights also point to an ’exit’ – yes there may be a way through all of this malaise. Just as Richard Hell riffs on betrayal not being about one, but about two (who did what to who?), so too l’enfer may be more about me, than I might like to admit. This is not to deny that others also play a crucial role in our lives, in both positive and negative ways. Thus, in a more balanced fashion, we might say ‘L’enfer, oui c’est toi, mais c’est moi aussi’ (that is, Hell – yes, it is you, but it is me, too). This would seem to be a principle, both poetic and philosophical, which all of our main three protaganists (Sartre, Rimbaud and Richard Hell) could agree on, even if those characters stuck in the mirrorless world of Huis Clos (Garcin, Inez and Estelle) seem doomed forever to stay in the vicious fatal circle of blaming others for existing in (and failing to escape) a Hell of their own making.

To conclude, in a related vein, let me add some haiku of my own making which might reinvent Hell as a more creative and (dare I say joyous) place to exist.

Lucifer Haiku#

Hear, hear, Sartre
holler that the writer
ain’t no dirty liar.

Into Hell we gotta
stumble like Rimbaud,
who found Beauty bitter.

But clamber also outta
on the steps and shaky ladder,
past Burroughs with his junky bother.

And Ginsberg there
to share the East Side flat
with Richard bare.

Of food and water:
hear, hear, the punks
holler that truth’s no more.

But Nihilism’s better.
L’enfer! L’enfer!

(Irwin 2024b)

Footnote#

1.The Damned Poets also spawned a group of ‘Damned Painters’, led by the French painter Francis Gruber and there was significant collaboration artistically between these painters and poets/philosophers.

In a previous critical text of mine from Red Ogre Review (June 2024), entitled ‘Coventry Haiku – Two-Tone Poetics and the Psychogeography of Ska’ (Irwin and Rose 2024), I collaborated with the artist Gemma Rose to develop a hybrid poem-illustration set of haiku and images. As a kind of psychogeography of urban alienation, these were under a ‘damned’ vision, with Gemma’s ‘peintre maudit’ images inscribing reference to the recent TV series on Ska and Coventry, This Town, juxtaposed with the Stardust ballroom in Coolock, Dublin (scene of a disastrous and fatal fire in 1981).

Another version of Hell, then.

References#

Ferlinghetti, Laurence (1960) ‘Fantasy 7004’ in The New American Poetry. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hell, Richard (2008) ‘My Punk Beginnings and Are Rock Lyrics Poetry?’, Malaga, Spain.

Hell, Richard and The Voidoids (1977) Blank Generation. Sire Records, New York.

Irwin, Jones (2024b) Deep Image or A Painting By Jeffrey Dahmer. Tofu Ink Press, California.

Lane, Véronique (2017) The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s Appropriations of Modern Literature from Rimbaud to Michaux. Bloomsbury, London.

Love, Damien (2022) ‘Blank Generation’ in Television: The Ultimate Music Guide (Uncut). Kelsey Media, London.

Mark Treharne (1998) ‘Introduction’ in Rimbaud, Arthur (1998) A Season in Hell and Illuminations. Orion Publishing, London.

Rimbaud, Arthur (1998) A Season in Hell and Illuminations. Orion Publishing, London.

Rose, Cynthia (1983) ‘Richard Hell’ (Interview). City Limits, United States.

Sartre, J.P. (1990) Huis Clos and other plays. Penguin, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Symons, Arthur (2021) The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Legare Street Press, London.