Comte de Lautréamont (1846–1870)

Lykiard's translation of Maldoror is a profoundly puzzling yet mesmerizing work. It's content is some of the strangest and most shocking in the history of literature. A misanthropic protagonist leads us through tales replete with murder, degradation, and sexual deviance (The oddly tender and intimate copulation with a female shark springs to mind immediately). Contrarily, the language that conveys this madness is often poetic, and at times humorous and conversational. The work explores show more different narrative structures, often switching between first and third person.

Poesies is the exact opposite of Maldoror. The straight forward language condemns writers such as Hugo and Milton for wallowing in sorrow and shame, and argues that literature must always convey hope and that man is by his nature driven to do good. It is hard to tell if this work is a satire or, conversely, if Maldoror is a warning against the very attitudes its protagonist displays. These two works; along with a selection of letters, apocryphal writings, critical fragments, and reminisces by Ducasse's (AKA Lautremont) peers provide us with an insightful portrait of this literary enigma whose work greatly inspired the Surrealist movement. show less

So pervasive was the language and imagery of Lautréamont’s “Les Chant de Maldoror” that I often laughed out loud—not a common event with literature. Especially from a work written nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. There is no real narrative, so to speak, told more like a fever dream rendered into prose poem and peppered with more exclamation points than a Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century (Astonishment!!!). Yet it was the perfect piece of fantastic fiction to read show more between customer service calls. There was nothing any entitled human piss-bag miffed over not getting confirmation of a 4X4 on their Suburban for their three-person golf outing was going to say to shock, anger or even annoy me after reading passages such as those below. Enjoy.

“If the earth were covered with lice like grains of sand on the sea shore the human race would be annihilated in the midst of terrible suffering. What a spectacle! And I, with the wings of an angel, motionless in the air, contemplating it!”

“With a head in my hand, gnawing the skull, I stood on one foot like a heron at the edge of a precipice slashed into the flanks of a mountain. I was seen descending into the valley while the flesh of my bosom was still and calm as the lid of a tomb!”

“ . . . however it is permitted to us all to kill flies and even rhinoceroses in order to rest from time to time from too much tedious labor.”

“I have never been able to laugh, though I have tried many times. It is very difficult to learn how to laugh. Or rather I think a feeling of repugnance toward that monstrosity forms an essential distinction of my character. Very well then, I witnessed something even funnier: I saw a fig eating a donkey! And yet I did not laugh: frankly there was no movement of any buccal portion. The desire to weep seized upon me so strongly that my eyes let fall a tear. ‘Nature! Nature!’ I cried, sobbing. ‘The sparrow-hawk rends the sparrow, the fig eats the donkey, and the tapeworm devours mankind!’”

“I am filthy. Lice gnaws me. Swine, when they gaze upon me, vomit. Scabs and scars of leprosy have scaled off my skin, which exudes a yellowish pus. I know not the waters of rivers nor the dew from the clouds. From my nape, as from a dunghill, an enormous toadstool with umbelliferous peduncles is growing. Seated upon a shapeless throne I have not stirred hand nor foot for four centuries. My toes have taken root in the soil and have grown up around my belly in a kind of lush growth, neither plant nor flesh, where dwell vile parasites. Nevertheless, my heart is beating. Yet how could it beat if the rottenness and the reek of my cadaver (I dare not say my body) did not abundantly nourish it?”

“O, if only, instead of being in a hell, the universe had been an immense celestial anus! See the gesture I am making with my abdomen: yes, I would have plunged my penis through its bloody sphincter, rending apart by my impetuous motions the very bones of its pelvis!”

And this work was inspiring enough, throughout the years, still in print and revered by philosophers and writers, that several artists have drawn, inked and painted monstrosities of their own. An absurdist’s treasure for never straying from that one governing principle: to be as absurd as fucking possible. And to be as disgusting as humanly able wouldn’t hurt the effort, either. It’s been done, so I’ll never have to stir up the mold myself. Thank you, weird ass Frenchman/Uruguayan/Absurdist extraordinaire. show less

This is poised between moustache-twirling gothic and surrealism avant la lettre. (It's the original source of Duchamp's chance encounter of the sewing machine and umbrella on operating table, and an avowed influence also on Artaud, Dalí, others). Maldoror is some kind of planeswalker who spends his time murdering beautiful young men, having sex with sharks, and kicking the shit out of God in weird, cartoonishly vulgar ways, like he sees God coming down the street but then God realizes the show more street is a giant snake that Maldoror left there in wait for him and the snake squeezes God until his eyes burst and then Maldoror has sex with his butt till he screams. No, okay, it's really not all butts, but in the anarchic mojo here, I'm still gonna revise and say this is poised between moustache-twirling gothic, surrealism avant la lettre, and Chuck Tingle, author of Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt. It's the Tingle spirit applied to a Satanic antihero with a heaping dose of bright lucid nightmares for fuel. It's one of the most incredible things I've read, and I don't esteem it more only because of the deep expanse of its viciousness--a lot of this is just torture porn, and I seem to have little tolerance for that kind of stuff these days no matter how pretty and pink the flayed quivering flesh is. show less

This is a very peculiar book for review because one can approach it from two perspectives - its 'importance' in literature and whether it is actually worth reading. It is like the Bible in that respect - the sort of blasphemous implication that Isidore Ducasse (the actual author) might have appeared to revel in.

Let us start with a first proposition - that it is 'important'. Yes, Maldoror is important if you are a specialist or interested in French literature and at two levels. It is both a show more stepping stone from the Gothick (with Maldoror containing many of Gothick's traditional tropes) over the stream of decadence to surrealism with its famous phrase in the seminal Book Six referring to the "chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!" and a first step to the self-knowing French literary meme of literature as a thing that refers to itself.

The addition of the so-called Poems to this edition is important because they change our reception to Maldoror simply by being read alongside them. Maldoror might be read as a sincere rage against God and Man filled with brutality and evil if we did not see the author in the Poems assert in a series of cynical platitudes the exact opposite point of view in the Poems.

This tricksiness continues with the titling and style - the Poems are just sets of often pompous rhetorical aphorisms, often contradictory, while Maldoror, ostensibly presented as a novel (though only the Sixth Book comes close to being a coherent narrative) is really a large number of prose poems but connected only through the Mathurin-like character of Maldoror (though even this is never clear).

Ducasse is undoubtedly a possible literary genius but since he died at the age of 24 (his life is almost incredibly obscure to the extent that one is suspicious of his very existence though it is indeed evidenced) we cannot confirm any claim to this effect. My own interpretation is that we have a very intelligent and possibly obsessive young man playing with the literature of his time in order to expose its and our absurdities through exposing the rhetorical positions it and we take.

Without the cynico-beneficent platitudes of the associated Poems, left to take Maldoror at face value, we might fall into the trap of taking his essay in evil so seriously as to dismiss him as a very clever, possibly insane, adolescent but the whole is too well crafted for that, including the very clever pastiching of the pompous declamatory styles of the era and of late romanticism as a whole.

The litanisation of literary figures of the first two thirds of the French (and European) nineteenth century in the Poems, many of whom are now forgotten, makes them of their time and place. It tells us one of the few things we 'know' about this body of work - it is literary work about literature that tells us nothing of life and is conscious of that position.

Those who have just read Maldoror and taken it as another 'set text' of 'evil, be thou my good' are missing the point that they are the subjects of the satire themselves - for satire it is.

But what of our second proposition - is it worth reading? Well, unless you are a student of European literary culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably not.

The Poems certainly are only interesting in that context and as counterpoint to Maldoror but they are what they are designed to be - two long sets of platitudes being declaimed by a pompous fool (not, of course, Ducasse as Ducasse but Ducasse as player of pompous fools).

Maldoror has its moments where a page or passage grips but its incoherence and self-referencing as well as its internal debate with a late romanticism that is no longer an 'issue' for us today is mostly rather dull while the type of evil it offers is no longer persuasive to a world of scientific precision in our understanding of the inadequacy of serial and child killers.

The book is set in a specific mental milieu - that of the problem of God and evil in a believing age where many intellectuals were not believers or were forced into believing positions by politics or the market. This question is now only of interest to theologians and historians and not to the intelligent general observer in an advanced Western culture which can more safely take this God-thing out of the political equation and just consider how banal the evil that men do is when looked at more closely. This age needs no rhetoric, pomposity, complex sentences and epic similes. Milton did this definitively and better and everything else is just a foot-note to his Satan.

If you want to avoid being bogged down in the grand scheme (some 200 pages in this edition) and are prepared to miss out on the one or two real gems in the flow of rhetorical mud, you can just jump to the 'novel' itself in Book Six and kill two birds with one stone - get a sense of the cruel wit of Ducasse at the expense of his contemporaries and some understanding of his influence on the surrealists where the section cries out for Max Ernst's collages to illustrate it.

So, all in all, an important book in its context but a rather dull one not because Ducasse is a dull or bad writer (he is not) but because he is contesting things and ideas with an almost brutal intensity that are not really going to be of much interest to us or our age. show less