Lautreamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works (Exact Change, 1994)«André Breton wrote that Maldoror is "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846), and early death in Paris (1870). Lautréamont's writings bewildered his contemporaries but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his lawless black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted slogan, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!" Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger." This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautréamont's writings available in English, in a superior translation.» - New York Times
"Lautréamont's style is hallucinatory, visionary. This new fluent translation makes clear its poetic texture and what may be termed its subversive attraction." - Washington Post Book World
«I'm absolutely mad on mad people. Some of my favourite artworks and novels appear to have been spewed from the hands and minds of mad folk, from Henry Darger to Alfred Jarry to Jean-Michel Basquiat, but none has made a more prominent dent on my brain than the Comte de Lautreamont's potty page-turner, Les Chants du Maldoror. It's like an old, twisted rulebook on how to break all literary rules.
It was only a handful of springtimes ago I discovered the book, daydreaming through my Surrealism lectures at the barmy Byam Shaw School of Art off Holloway Road. I'm sure André Breton would have approved. I was probably dreaming of lobsters or eyeballs getting sliced by razorblades, when we were given this hand-out with a quote from Maldoror: "He was... as beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table!" Just like that, I'd found a literary soul-mate.
You don't have to be mad to read Maldoror, but it helps. First published in 1865 - and devoured by the Surrealists - it is perhaps the most kaleidoscopic, stomach-churning piece of literature you'll ever come across, where sleepy hermaphrodites rub shoulders with randy octopuses and lice "as big as elephants". When Maldoror, the sadistic protagonist and master of disguises, isn't giving himself a Chelsea Smile, he's torturing people or having sex with a female shark (the only living creature with anything in common with him – a violent temperament).
What I love most is the way, back in the 1860s, Lautreamont wasn't afraid to unleash his deepest secret fantasies, however murky and disgraceful the realms of his mind might seem. Today, it irritates me how a lot of writers avoid getting their teeth into sex scenes or violence but gleefully describe a lovely walk in the park for five or so pages.
Maldoror's teeth chomp on many poor young boys' flesh in the book's six cantos, but his tongue remains firmly in his cheek. By the end, it's clear Maldoror's disregard for humankind is a metaphor for Lautreamont's disregard for the traditional novel. Phrases such as "handsome as the retractibility of claws in birds of prey" straddle madness and genius in such a way it makes me blush with reverence.
Whenever I feel inclined to reach for a crap literary cliché, I feel Maldoror breathing heavily on the back of my neck. While Lautreamont's filthy, rotten banquet may not be to everyone's taste, ultimately his writing aims to invigorate our dulled, softened literary appetites. In the introduction, the author gives a "warning to readers" that "the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve [your] soul as water does sugar". Those of you in the mood for a riotous orgy of cruelty and mayhem won't be disappointed. Lautreamont is the master of subversion. But young boys and female sharks, beware.» - Richard Milward
«Les Chants de Maldoror is based around a character called Maldoror, a figure of unrelenting evil who has forsaken God and humankind. The book combines an obscene and violent narrative with vivid and often surrealistic imagery.
The critic Alex De Jonge wrote:
'Lautreamont forces his readers to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and make them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake'.
Lautréamont’s writing is full of bizarre scenes, vivid imagery and drastic shifts in tone and style. There are heavy measures of black humor.
The six cantos are subdivided in 60 verses of different length (I/14, II/16, III/5, IV/8, V/7, VI/10), which were originally not numbered, but rather separated by lines. The final eight verses of the last canto form a small novel, and were marked with Roman numerals. Each canto closes with a line to indicate its end.
At the beginning and end of the cantos the text often refers to the work itself; Lautréamont also references himself in the capacity of the author of the work; Isidore is recognized as the "Montevidean." In order to enable the reader to realize that he is embarking on a "dangerous philosophical journey," Lautréamont uses stylistic means of identification with the reader, a procedure which Charles Baudelaire already used in his introduction of Les Fleurs du Mal. He also comments on the work, providing instructions for reading. The first sentence contains a "warning" to the reader:
God grant that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar (1,1).» - www.newworldencyclopedia.org
"Little is known of Ducasse's early childhood. At the age of thirteen, he was sent to France to acquire French education and training in engineering. Ducasse entered in 1859 the Imperial Lycée at Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrenées, probably spending his school holidays with his relatives in Bazet, his father's birthplace. Three years later he left the school, and in 1863 he entered the Lycée at Pau (now the Lycée Louis-Barthou).
At school Ducasse distinguished himself in arithmetic and drawing, but he was also noted for his extravagances of thought and style. One of his schoolfellows recalls that Ducasse's "own brand of madness revealed itself definitively in a French essay in which with a dreadful profusion of adjectives he'd seized the opportunity of accumulating the most horrible images of death." Gustave Hinstin, Ducasse's teacher, put him on detention for this essay. "Ducasse was deeply hurt by Hinstin's reproaches and this punishment."
After spending some years probably at Tardes, Ducasse visited Montevideo. According to Albert Lacroix, Ducasse's first publisher, he settled in Paris in 1867 intending to study at the Polytechnic or the College of Mining. He lived first in a hotel on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Financially he was still supported by his father. With the help of his generous allowance, Ducasse was able shut himself off from bourgeois society and devote himself entirely to writing. "He wrote only at night, seated at his piano," said Léon Genonceaux, who published Les Chants de Maldoror in 1890. "He used to declaim, would coin his phrases hammering out his tirades with the chords."
Ducasse's career lasted only two years. During this period he invented himself as an author and created his own aesthetic universe, by becoming in the beginning a published writer and self-confident breaker of taboos, and then a literary theorist and philosopher.
The first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror was published anonymously in Paris in 1868. It contained several references to Georges Dazet, Ducasse's friend at the lycée in Tarbet in 1861-62. In the second version of the canto, reprinted at Bordeaux in Evariste Carrance's anthology, Parfums de l'Ame (1869), his friend is simply "D..."
When the complete work was printed in 1869, Ducasse used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, borrowed from the hero of Eugène Sue's Latréaumont (1837), set in the days of Louis XIV. In this final version the "D..." had completely disappeared, and was replaced by different creatures from octopus to vampire bat.
From the very first lines Maldoror makes it clear that it was not written for the readers of Sue's popular novels: "May it please that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, finds without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages." Maldoror, the title character and a alter ego of the narrator, is a Luciferian rebel, a shapeshifter, who has chosen evil over good, but who at the same time suffers from cruelty and occasionally feels pity. In canto III Maldoror rapes a young girl, sets his bulldog on her, and then cuts open her vagina with a penknife. "From this enlarged trough he removed the internal organs, one after the other: the intestines, lungs, liver, and finally the heart itself were ripped from their roots and pulled out through the frightful aperture into the light of day."Fearing prosecution, Ducasse's Belgian publisher refused to distribute the work to booksellers. Maldoror went nearly unnoticed by the public. Ducasse himself said in a letter, that "the whole thing went down the drain." Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had published Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, mentioned the author in his Bulletin trimestriel des Publications défendues en France, imprimées à l'Estranger (October 1869): "The author of this book is of no less rare a breed. Like Baudelaire, like Flaubert, he believes that the aesthetic expression of evil implies the most vital appreciation of good, the highest morality." And in the Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire the reviewer wrote that the book "will find a place among the bibliographical curiosities".
"To study evil so as to bring out the good is not to study good in itself. Given a suitable phenomenon, I shall seek its cause." (from Poésies, 1870)
In 1869 Ducasse moved to 32 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and next year to 15 Rue Vivienne, and then to a hotel on Faubourg-Montmartre. Between April and June 1870, he published two booklets of aphoristic prose pieces, Poésies, both printed by Balitout, Questroy et Cie. With Poésis Ducasse wanted to produce a counterpoint to the provocative and romantic theme of evil in Maldoror. "To sing of boredom, suffering, miseries, melancholies, death, darkness, the somber, etc., is wanting at all costs to look only at the puerile reverse of things," Ducasse wrote in a letter. "This is why I have completely changed methods, to sing exclusively only of hope, expectation, CALM, happiness, DUTY."Ducasse died during the siege of Paris, on November 24, 1870. "I will leave no memoirs," Ducasse stated in Poésies. His body was buried in a temporary grave in the Cemetière du Nord. In 1871 his remnants were moved to another place in the cemetery. Maldoror was republished in 1890 but it received little notice until André Breton rescued his work from obscurity. Ducasse's often quoted simile, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!", become a definition of Surrealistic thought. Ducasse's work has also inspired a number of artists, including Salvador Dali's etchings from 1934 and Man Ray's 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse' (1920). Jeremy Reed's fictionalized biography, Isidore (1992), was based on the author's life.
After Maldoror was canonized as a work of genius, its shocking scenes have been regarded as the essential part of its construction and philosophy, like in the works of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, in Lautréamont Nomad (1994) Mark Polizzotti argued, "the average child, is capable of imagining worse" - which leaves open the question of whether it is an issue with regard to an average child. However, Maurice Blanchot has emphasized that Maldodor's sadism is far from Sade. "In Lautréamont, there is a natural rebellion against injustice, a natural tendency toward goodness, a powerful elation that is, from the start, characterized by neither perversion nor evil." (Lautréamont and Sade, 2004)
Ducasse mentions in a letter as his sources of inspiration the poetry of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Byron and Baudelaire. Les Chants de Maldoror was comprised of six cantos, in which the pseudo-aristocratic voice of the narrator expresses his deadpan disdain for the the mankind. "My poetry shall consists of attacks, by all means, upon that wild beast, man, and the Creator, who should never have begotten such vermin!" Full of contradiction, Maldoror mixes moralizing with macabre humor, warns of its corruptive power on its readers, but ends in catharsis, pretends to praise death, darkness, and cultural destruction, but basically re-established what it condemns. Many critics have discussed the autobiographical references given in the text and its homosexual elements. In canto IV Maldoror confesses, "I have always taken infamous fancy to the pale youngsters in schools and the sickly mill-children." However, the sparse self-references in Maldoror add little to what we know of the life of the author." - Petri Liukkonen
"The Comte de Lautréamont, whose real name was Isidore Ducasse, wrote only one novel: Les Chants De Maldoror which he published himself. He died a year later during the siege of Paris1870, alone and anonymous in his hotel room at 7 Faubourg-Montmartre. He was twenty four years old. On his death certificate the cause of death was listed as unknown. In his work he had written that he would leave no memoirs and that he knew his annihilation would be complete.
But Lautréamont's modesty, like his work, was constructed from the most toxic and delicious irony for in Maldoror, he had built a subversive device, half virus, half bomb, that would erode and disintegrate western literature. In Maldoror, Lautréamont takes the form of the 19th century Romantic novel and reanimates it like a demon possessing a corpse. The Songs are composed of complex and unstable allegorical narrative, shocking juxtapositions of language and image, breathtaking shifts in tone and style, endless sentences that wind and swerve and even deny their own subjects. And throughout there is the voice of Lautréamont. Sometimes a charming confidant, sometimes a delirious mystic or a bombastic lecturer, a penitent sinner, an angel, a deranged killer, a poet, the author of Romantic literature. Or perhaps it is Isidore Ducasse.
Both high literature and penny dreadful, Maldoror used plagiarism and collage before Dada. It was beloved and imitated by the Surrealists, revered by the Situationists and it was both Modernist and Postmodernist before Modernism. As decades pass the myths, the claims and the counter claims around the work of Isidore Ducasse shift and expand. Maldoror denies definition, it is ambivalent and unfinished. It is still dangerous." - bak.spc.org/maldoror/isidore.html
Tales from the Crypt V (black beach reading) by Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
The Chants of Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse/Le Comte de Lautréamont
“My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me. Tell me where did you sleep last night.“
“In the pines, in the pines, where the cold wind blows . . .”
(Nirvana)
Many the inroads made on evil, its constituency, continuance and crepuscular constitution. Baudelaire stacked up big wins. Dennis Cooper, in The Marble Swarm, to shop close and current. Poe, posies, poesy. None outdo Maldoror. This is the pit, art of darkness, full-on damnation to its gory core. †
“Death rained down like rags in Paris/Like an ugly vampire, like the wings of an umbrella . . .”* †
I read sick and twisted texts to free my mind from banal bourgeois domination! Unable to recall how I found or heard of it, I must have been 16, I’ve ravened on these Chants more times than I have read Genet. In a violent reevaluation of cheap businessman’s values I so batten, cover to cover ever to begin again.
“It was a turbulent age, stained purple/Like a twisted arcade of assassins . . .” †
At 24, its author’s age at death, (In mourning, the shadow of the lost object falls on the ego) I resolved to memorize Maldoror and transport him internally. As my copy would not slip into my jacket pocket, I seized steel rule and razor, excising all excess from its margins, carving it to fit, that I might wear it everywhere for hex protection.
“Inventing wolves to defend the light . . .” †
Face it: we know nothing about Le Comte de Lautréamont. In All Fires the Fire, Cortazar stuck tight to truth by literally leaving him out of this story about him! Then Neruda penned Lautréamont Reconquistado †, a suitably haunting horror show of stanzas sampled here.
No one else knows shit. Authors have disguised themselves, doubling, dissembling; hell, Rimbaud disappeared. Well, in a cage match Smack Down, I.D. whomps em (period). We paraphrase Michaux (It’s necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.) Evidently Ducasse wrote, yet did not exist at all.
There is a prehistory to Rimbaud’s
“I is another.” (Letter to the Seer)
Which renders it elusive in its authorship
And therefore still more authoritative.
In 1854 Nerval inscribes a photo of himself
“I am another.” In 1870, six months
Before Rimbaud’s world-reversing letter,
The Comte de Lautreamont writes
“If I exist I am not another . . .”
He then starved to death
At the age of 24, shifting
Our emphasis to “if.”
“The cruel nocturnal falsifier tests his spurious talons/From honest eyes he fashions two holes/With black velvet, his reason makes a mask/With a howl, his celestial inclination is smothered.” †
“The toad of Paris, the boneless beast/From the obscene city follows each of his steps/Waits for him, and opens the doors of its thick jaws/Little Ducasse is devoured.” †
* “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” (Le Comte de Lautréamont). Isn’t Satan called The Prince of Lies? While Surrealists resurrect him for his sinister vision, Situationists (detournment) love him for his lies.
See Ducasse: Poesies.
† Translated by Maria Jacketti, available in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, FSG, 2003. - www.montevidayo.com/
“All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:”
Satan in Paradise Lost Book 1, 106-8
Milton
These are the songs of Maldoror: prose poems in the style of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen De Paris, organized into six cantos of between 5 to 16 stanzas each, first published in 1868, to almost universal neglect and uninterest.
Who is Maldoror? The text tells us that he was born evil; that he never cuts his fingernails so that he can pierce the breast of a child more easily therewith to drink its blood; that his breath exhales poison; that his forehead is furrowed green; that his face is like the face of some hideous deep-sea fish; that he lives alone in a cave, shunned by and shunning humanity; that he prowls the city at night wrapped in black; that he hasn’t slept for thirty years; that he was born deaf but that he developed the ability to hear; that he likes to have sex with prepubescent boys; that he is permanently tumescent; that he changes his clothes twice a week so as to save mankind from dying of their stench; that he is a shape-changer wanted by an army of spies and agents throughout Europe; that he loves the cold purity of mathematics; that he has assisted at the revolutions of the globe and been a silent witness to cataclysms and disasters; that he only has one eye in the centre of his forehead; and finally, in the last canto, there is the suggestion that Maldoror is Lucifer himself, the devil with a myriad names, this particular one conjured up by Lautreamont himself, and compounded of (echoes of) the French words for sickness or evil (mal), gold (or), and horror (horreur). We let these words, then, as defined by Littre’s Dictionary (first edition published 1863-72, coterminous with the publication of Maldoror) stand as symbols of various aspects of the text, and our responses to it.
1.) MAL: that which is contrary to virtue, probity and honour, that which wounds, which hurts. A symbol of transgression and pain.
Maldoror’s text transgresses not least in the shocking power of its images, to which we will return later, but in the general violation and blurring of traditional literary boundaries such as genre and structure, such as the relationships between author and protagonist, and between reader and text.
Genre and Structure
As prose poems, the writing violates the traditional distinctions between poetry and prose. To be sure, Lautreamont is taking Baudelaire as his model here, but he does so in a quite self-conscious way, in which the discourse is aware of its own ambiguous status as song, chant, lay, and text, and in which it proclaims a synesthesia between speaking and writing, reading and hearing: I propose to proclaim in a loud voice and without emotion the cold and grave chant that you are about to hear. 1.8 We are reading prose, but the spirit of poetry saturates language and protagonist: the fundamental accents of poetry preserve none the less their intrinsic sway over my intelligence. 5.1.
Although Maldoror present his texts to us as songs, he also highlights the process of writing: I find it stupid that it should be necessary…. to place before me an open ink stand and several sheets of uncrumpled paper. 6.2
In an ironic dig at the late 19th century doctrine of art for art’s sake, he proclaims the ‘usefulness’ of his ‘poems’, calling them Dramatic Episodes of implacable utility! 6.2 blurring the distinction between the lower reading for pleasure (titivation) or the loftier reading for improvement (cultivation). If Maldoror is the devil, from his point of view, the utility of the verses must lie in their poisonous, damning effect upon the reader.
Baudelaire’s prose poems were written as sketches and published randomly in various journals over a period of time. Maldoror’s prose poems have the same appearance of being occasional pieces, but they are in fact carefully structured into a whole, as Maldoror himself tells us: Now the synthetic section of my work is complete and sufficiently paraphrased…Today I am about to invent a little novel of thirty pages 6.1
The first three cantos have a different character from cantos 4 and 5, and use various repeated lines or sentences within each stanza as a quasi poetic device, one used frequently in chants. Cantos 4 and 5 exchange this device for another one: a parody of French Academic prose, which –both parody and target- is often impenetrable. Maldoror here employs embedding, double negatives, parentheses and other rhetorical devices; he starts sentences that get longer and longer, and then he simply abandons them:
By that very fact, depriving myself of the light and skeptical mannerisms of ordinary conversations, and sufficiently prudent not to ask… I no longer recall what I was intending to say, for I do not remember the beginning of the sentence. 6.2
By that very fact, depriving myself of the light and skeptical mannerisms of ordinary conversations, and sufficiently prudent not to ask… I no longer recall what I was intending to say, for I do not remember the beginning of the sentence. 6.2
Canto 6 contains a story spread out over several stanzas – up till now, each stanza has been totally self contained with no reference to others around it. This ‘novel’ is supposed to embody the themes and images in the preceding part of the work. The work thus has certain similarities in structure with another contemporary work, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which also foregrounds ‘metaphysical’ matter by placing it in front of a narrative. In its form, then, and by appearing to be something which it is not, the text transgresses notions of literary probity.
Relationship between author and protagonist
Throughout the text there is the disconcerting suggestion that Maldoror is a portrait of the author himself, but of course, one must always guard against such readerly naivete. The danger of identifying protagonist with author is not mitigated by the fact that almost nothing is known about the author. Lautreamont is a pseudonym which covers the real name of Isadore Lucien Ducasse, an indigent writer who was kicking around Paris in the late 1860s but who doesn’t seem to have made many friends, or made much of a mark on his times. His death certificate dated 24 November 1870 states that he was found dead in his lodgings, was a bachelor, and then contains these highly suggestive, emblematic words, so suitable for a writer who left virtually no other trace of his existence on earth except for this one vile, sublime masterpiece: no further information.
Matters are not helped by a deliberate inconsistency in the use of pronouns and point of view. In some stanzas, Maldoror is being observed/described by another party (pronoun ‘he’; mocking title ‘Our Hero’); in others he is presenting himself or events from his viewpoint (pronoun ‘I’). This blurring of boundaries between viewpoint and selves of protagonist and author can take place in the middle of a stanza, in the middle of a sentence, even, with no warning or explanation, and the reader has to be alert. Madmen, savants and children often refer to themselves in the third person. So the question stands: is Maldoror referring to himself in the third person, or is Lautreamont referring to his creation? It’s this slippage of pronouns and resulting ambiguity that does much to create the transgressive mood of the work on a rhetorical, structural level.
Relationship between reader and text
For a text to break frame and address the reader directly is of course not new in 19th century literature, but Maldoror/Lautreamont’s handling of this device is quite original. Surely no reader in 19th century fiction has been so abused or treated with such contempt, bile and venomous rancour by an author; and surely no reader has been so well understood by his author. This attitude can be seen in its most concentrated and brilliant form in stanza 5.1, a long meditation on the nature of the reader and our interaction with the work. Maldoror anticipates the disgust and confusion of the reader in our encounter with his text: since the instinctive repulsion that manifested itself during my first pages has noticeably diminished in depth in inverse ratio to your application to the reading,…we must hope that your recovery will soon have reached it final stages. And he suggests a remedy for those readers whose sensibility does not allow them to enjoy these rancid visions. This remedy involves first ripping off your mothers arms and eating them. After he has effectively called the reader’s sister a whore, he provides a recipe of a potion the reader must drink in order to fully enjoy the work:
A basin full of lumpy blennorrhagic pus in which was first dissolved a hairy ovarian cyst, a follicular chancre, an inflamed prepuce skinned back from the glans by paraphimosis, and three red slugs. 5.1
A basin full of lumpy blennorrhagic pus in which was first dissolved a hairy ovarian cyst, a follicular chancre, an inflamed prepuce skinned back from the glans by paraphimosis, and three red slugs. 5.1
Once you have drunk this evil brew, he crows, you will appreciate my poetry!
Maldoror’s ideal reader is one who knows how to unite enthusiasm with an internal coldness, [an] observer with a concentrated disposition (an accurate and sensitive description of any careful reader, it seems to me), and Maldoror tells us that he finds us perfect, even though – or perhaps because- the reader refuses to understand him. Paradoxically, and as a supreme transgression of the normal relationship between reader and text, the text simply does not wish to be understood; it refuses this kind of assimilation.
But it’s really in the second meaning of our emblematic word mal that the work really transgresses, for Maldoror sings of his utter hatred for God and Man. My poetry will consist only in the attack by all means in my power upon Man, that wild beast, and the Creator, who should never have created such vermin. 2.4 Maldoror, we learn, has suffered pain, a wound from both God and Man, and he sings about his resulting anger, humiliation and despair. Not since Milton’s Satan has wickedness and lust for revenge sung itself so powerfully. In one sense, the work is a long dark paean to revenge, the revenge of a soul outraged that consciousness has been thrust upon him; that he has to endure life on such unequal terms in a body marred by atrocious ugliness; revenge for being outcast.
Maldoror begins his text by warning the reader that he will be negatively effected by the work to come: the deadly emanations from this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water 1.1, and this is no empty rhetorical boast. The sickening power of Maldoror’s images and the virulent hatred for everything under the sun (with some notable exceptions as we shall see) does indeed cast a spell on the reader, altering forever the way he sees the world. The reader is literally sickened, as we have seen in the extract quoted above. By singing his pain and hatred so lucidly, Maldoror transfers it to his reader. Maldoror, his Creator (Lautreamont) and Man (the reader) are locked into an inescapable and terrible trinity.
The text is full of images of horror straight out of Bosch or the images of war photographers. To be sure, Lautreamont is using conventions well established by the Gothic literature of Maturin and Radcliffe, but he lifts them to a whole new level of gratuitous cruelty.
In one canto a young man is hung from a tree by his hair while two women – his mother and his wife- tar him and whip him; in another we are treated to an image of God sitting on a throne made of human excrement and gold holding the corpse of a man which he is eating, his feet bathed in a pool of boiling blood in which other living men are swimming or drowning; the text abounds with lice, spiders, tapeworms, grubs, all eating each other or eating man or being eaten by him; there are countless cruel murders and swollen corpses, rapes of prepubescent boys and virgin girls, acts of bestiality; disembowelment, torture, and death by a thousand different inventive means. The text is a catalogue of cruelty, a handbook of techniques for the depraved. Metaphors and similes all involve acts of violent cruelty: [the Creator] would show much wisdom if, during the time strictly necessary to smash a woman’s head with hammer blows, he would forget his sidereal majesty… 2.3 Maldoror’s horreur is intensely physical: the text abounds with descriptions of body parts and fluids. There is a stench arising from the pages. (Ironically, when composing this piece my automatic spell checker kept ‘correcting’ Maldoror to ‘malodor’.) You who are now gazing upon me, stand back, for my breath exhales poison.1.8
Maldoror strips away the conventional pieties of culture and civilization and reveals the true basis of life: horror and cruelty, nature red in tooth and claw. (It’s this aspect of the work which had such a profound effect on Artaud’s thinking.) Perhaps the only other writer to approach this level of depravity is De Sade, but Lautreamont goes further than De Sade because the Marquis always stays firmly in the realm of the real: De Sade’s perversions are limited to the physical reality of the body and what it is capable of enduring or doing. Maldoror’s cruelties transcend human capabilities, however, and enter the realm of the surreal: his anus is colonized by a crab, his testicles have been emptied, dried and turned into a dwelling for two cute little hedgehogs; Maldoror fucks a talking shark, the only being, he says, that can match his own evil; God comes to visit earth and falls into a drunken sleep by the side of the road whereupon a passerby shits on his face for three days…Throughout, Maldoror accuses the Creator of having created this cruel world: Maldoror’s own evil is no match for the Creator’s (although, god knows, he tries hard enough).
Ironically, this is a profoundly religious work because it is not atheist. Maldoror/Lautreamont knows for sure that God exists, and his belief is sustained not by love of God but by an absolute implacable hatred of God.
3.) OR: metal of brilliant yellow and great weight, which one makes the currency of the highest value. A symbol of imperishable beauty and weighty value.
The work is not all depravity and disgust, however, for such a work would be indeed be unreadable. Buried in the middle of the syllables that make up the name of Maldoror, like gold in the pile of excrement of God’s throne, is the syllable for gold. Among Maldoror’s chants of unremitting hatred and cruelty are three that celebrate something positive, something good that Maldoror loves. The first of these is the stanza in which Maldoror sings of the sea, which he loves because its brine has the same taste as gall, because men have not been able to plumb its profundities, and because, deep though it is, it is still not as deep as the human heart. I salute you, ancient ocean. 1.8
The second is the stanza in which he celebrates friendship. Friendship, and the betrayal of it, is a recurring theme throughout the work. Maldoror has been betrayed by a friend - the Creator- and he retaliates by describing incidents where he befriends a being and then betrays it in the most savagely cruel way, in incidents of transgression. This is the main action of the ‘novel’ in the last canto, for example. But in stanza 3.1 he describes a friendship that is not betrayed, that is not perverted. He and his friend Mario are riding along the beach on two horses, inseparable, united. They light a fire and share a cloak, they become the angel of the land and the angel of the sea. The text has this to say about them: What do two hearts that love say to each other? Nothing…. Each takes as much interest in the life of the other as in his own life. 3.1
The third stanza where Maldoror sings the good, is his astonishing hymn to the abstract power and beauty of mathematics, the luminous triangle of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry 2.10. Math for Maldoror is something extremely cold, prudent and logical; it disperses the smoke in his mind and makes him more intelligent; it is unchanging, impersonal and eternal. The words he uses to describe math are the words used by other beings to describe God, but Maldoror cannot talk about God in this way because he is tied forever to God by the strength of his hatred for him. Math is Maldoror’s religion, cruelty and hatred his mode of being. It is with math that he was finally able to dethrone his Creator and unmask the evil that is the Creator’s true nature. Interestingly, in this stanza he mentions Descartes in passing, which seems to suggest that perhaps Maldoror’s Cruel Creator is Descartes’s demon, le dieu trompeur.
For the reader, then, what gives the text its beauty, its weight and value? First, is the power of Lautreamont’s language. Maldoror describes his depravities and cruelties in the most exquisite, limpid, purely nuanced French. The text is widely regarded as one of the great glories of the language, rendered impeccably into English by Guy Wernham in the NDP translation. Second, is the depiction of a kind of sensibility that is entirely modern, it seems to me, a psychology in which consciousness is foregrounded and which describes the dualism of mind and body as intrinsically problematic: I feel that my soul is padlocked in my body and cannot free itself to flee far from coasts beaten by the human sea 3.1. We can call this an ‘underground sensibility’, after Dostoevsky’s underground man, the character in 19th century literature who bears the closest psychological resemblance to Maldoror. Lautreamont gives us strings of beautifully crafted epigrams and insights into the kind of sensibility that experiences life as a wound:
How long it has been since I ceased to resemble myself. 3.1 If I exist, I am not someone else. I will not admit any equivocal plurality within myself. I wish to dwell alone within my intimate reason. Autonomy! 5.3 I received life like a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the gash. 3.1
Finally, the value of the work lies in its utter uniqueness. To be sure, Lautreamont has spawned a host of imitators, from Huysmans to Genet, from Burroughs to Bukowski, from the Decadents to the Surrealists; and his metaphysics opens the way for the existentialism of Kafka and Camus; but really, none of these can approach Lautreamont for sheer intensity of writing, technical brilliance and bravura originality of conception and performance. The only contemporary writer who comes close to Lautreamont in mood and matter is Dostoevsky. Some of the things Dostoevsky’s more jaundiced characters say would be well understood by Lautreamont’s Maldoror: When Ipolit Terentyev in The Idiot remarks: Isn’t it possible to simply eat me without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me? we hear also the mocking vengeful singing of Maldoror.
He who is singing now does not claim that his songs are new. On the contrary, he is proud in the knowledge that all the lofty and wicked thoughts of his hero reside within all men.
Oh if only instead of being a hell, the universe had been an immense anus! 5.5
+ FILMS:
"MALDOROR: The Last Film Ever Made
A feature film in twelve Super 8mm episodes made by and starring the no-torious no-bility of UNDERGROUND CINEMA • Kerri Sharp • Filmgruppe Abgedreht • Duncan Reekie • Caroline Kennedy • Colette Rouhier • Filmgruppe Chaos • Steven Eastwood • Jenigerfilm • Andrew Coram • Hant Film • Paul Tarrago • Jennet Thomas • German voice over Feridun Zaimoglu • English Voice over Duncan Reekie • Based on the novel by Isidore Ducasse a.k.a. the Comte de Lautreamont translated by Alexis Lykiard • Idea and Co-ordination by Duncan Reekie and Karsten Weber • 16mm post-production supported by Kulturelle Filmforderung Schleswig-Holstein e.V.
PLOT: Maldoror whose lips are sulphur, whose eyes are jasper, is stranded on Earth amongst the humanity he hates. His dark shadow haunts the day. At night he is pursued by phantoms and the memory of his unspeakable crimes. He searches the darkest secret corners of the world for revenge, for rest, for a companion. But he only ever finds horror, death and an endless battle against his arch enemy God and his loathsome Son. After an encounter with a festering angel, an amorous shark, a divine pubic hair and a dog on wheels, Maldoror embarks upon a course that leads inevitably to the final apocalyptic clash with the Creator himself !
FILM: In 1998 Duncan Reekie of the London Exploding Cinema Collective and Karsten Weber of the German Filmmgruppe Chaos got together and decided to make a Super 8 feature film of the infamous novel by Lautreamont. They selected around fifteen underground filmmakers/film groups from England and Germany and sent each one a chapter from the book and an invitation to make a film out of their chapter. Each maker could use different techniques, styles, actors and locations but there would be a voice over narration by one narrator over the entire feature.
There was no budget for the production, the filmmakers had to put up their own money, although Karsten managed to raise some post- production finance. The makers dug out their cameras, blackmailed their friends and relatives into assistance and began to shoot. Some of them studied the novel, some of them read their chapter once through and then immediately lost it. Film came back overexposed , underexposed, out of focus, friends split up, equipment broke down, an irreplaceable roll of film disappeared. Three filmmakers dropped out. Two years later the surviving twelve emerged bleary eyed from darkened attics and smoke filled cupboards with edited films which were then enlarged to 16mm and assembled into the feature length film.
Premiered in Germany in April 2000, Maldoror has hypnotised and thrilled both audiences and press.... a cult classic for the price of a second hand car.
The action takes place somewhere behind an impossible mesh of sex, violence, emulsion, bacteria, oil, bleach, petals, glue, dirt, abrasion, acid, superstition, glare, fur, insomnia, amphetamines and deep blue cold water. At first this mesh appears to be on the screen but slowly you realise that it is in fact behind your own eyes ! Despite its subject matter Maldoror is perhaps the most realistic feature film ever made, for although the big budget multiplex features strain with every tense and twisted fibre to conjure a world of carefree spontaneity they cannot compete with the reality of filmmakers who really don¹t give a fuck. Whilst the multiplex constructs its reality with narrative, style, action and music, Maldoror uses all these techniques but also adds real human conflict, chance, technical distortion, film surface scrimshaw, creative democracy and diversity. Maldoror does not just conjure the illusion of reality, it is actually real at the same time. Its got something that the multiplex cannot offer...... WILDNESS. We have identified a gap in the market and we have turned that gap into a terrible breach. Make no mistake once you have seen it all other films are meaningless. After Maldoror, filmmaking is no longer possible; in fact, it no longer has any purpose." - bak.spc.org/maldoror/maltext.html
Shuji Terayama: Les Chants de Maldoror
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