Comte De Lautréamont - The Songs of Maldoror
The Songs of Maldoror is a book that one reads only once, or twice, or a hundred thousand times. A very long prose poem, filled with rage, savagery but also with literary and scientific details collected during his studies by a brilliant student born in Montevideo, this work, made up of six long chapters, has struck more than one teenager in the heart. It is a marvelous encounter with Maldoror when one discovers, still a child and yet already an adult, the torments of love, the injustice of societies, the emptiness of the future, the anguish of existence, the quest for the absolute.
Such a story, epic in its style and scope, like an eminently modern Iliad, has left none of its readers unscathed by its multiple provocations, its literary power, its lyricism, its paradoxical realism, its fervor. This long dream of fever went completely unnoticed at the time of its publication.
What do the Songs tell? The all and nothing that is life stripped of its veneers. Maldoror is a mysterious character, certainly misanthropic, with an extensive vocabulary (any attempt to describe this character can only be accompanied by a careful use of euphemism), an obvious double of the author, whose life is not well known, and who will die two years later. Let us leave to this one his word, deliciously humble and terribly arrogant, to describe his project in a letter to the editor Verboeckhoven:
“I have sung evil as Mickiewicz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire, etc. have done. Naturally, I have exaggerated the pitch a little to make something new in the sense of this sublime literature which sings of despair only to oppress the reader, and to make him desire good as a remedy. Thus, it is always the good that is sung in sum, only by a more philosophical and less naive method than the old school, of which Victor Hugo and some others are the only representatives who are still alive […].
“Thus, what I desire above all, is to be judged by the critics, and, once known, that will go by itself.”
ISIDORE DUCASSE, KNOWN AS LAUTRÉAMONT
[…]Thus, what I desire above all is to be judged by the critics, and, once known, that will go by itself.”
Throughout the pages, Maldoror / Lautréamont / Ducasse tells in outraged and bloody terms his hatred of men, his love of death and nature, gives voice to animals and chimeras, prefigures the cut-up by copying pages of biology manuals of his time (including a moving description of the flight of the stork), fights a duel, vows to the Almighty, tells the Paris of the poor and the sick and says that “Since Racine, poetry has not progressed a millimeter. “
There is neither beginning nor end in Maldoror, only the plunge into the tormented unconscious of a lonely and frustrated soul, raging and romantic. A journey to the land of the worst darkness: ours.
It has been said that as soon as they were published, Les Chants de Maldoror were forgotten. It was not until 1917 that the founders of Surrealism, Philippe Soupault and André Breton, rediscovered the work of Lautréamont. Very quickly, the future authors of the Champs Magnétiques would see in it the first sketches of the genre that they would truly invent and formalize, and which would leave a lasting mark on all the arts of the 20th century.
It is the famous excerpt from the text, “as beautiful as the retraction of the talons of birds of prey; or again, as the uncertainty of muscular movements in the wounds of the soft parts of the posterior cervical region; or rather, as this perpetual rat trap, always retensioned by the animal caught, which can take rodents indefinitely, and function even hidden under the straw; and above all, as the fortuitous meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella! “that they will quote in standard of the Manifesto of Surrealism.
In fact, the text is not far from automatic writing (but yet more linear and, in the strict sense, sensible, than the first texts of Breton and Soupault), thus from this exploration of the depths of the human soul, where language is no longer anything but image and signifieds forever slipping away, which constituted the heart of Breton’s revolutionary project. It marks a precise and precious turning point in literary history that lovers of beauty as well as scandal will no doubt appreciate across days, terrors and time.
Two excerpts from Les Chants de Maldoror
Here are two excerpts from Les Chants de Maldoror which will give you a glimpse of the inimitable style that characterizes the major work of Isidore Ducasse (who, to be quite complete, will finish two other works two years later, under his real name, soberly entitled Poésies I and Poésies II which could not be more different from this text. Singing, in axioms deprived of any lyric exaggeration, the love, the goodness and the beauty, they open on these definitive words: “ The poetic moanings of this century are only sophisms “.)
I saw the men
I have seen, during all my life, without excepting a single one, men, with narrow shoulders, do stupid and numerous acts, stultify their fellow men, and pervert souls by all means. They call the motives of their actions: glory. Seeing these spectacles, I wanted to laugh like the others; but that, strange imitation, was impossible. I took a penknife with a sharp blade, and split my flesh where the lips meet. For a moment I thought I had achieved my goal. I looked in a mirror at this mouth bruised by my own will! It was a mistake! The blood which flowed abundantly from the two wounds prevented me from distinguishing if it was really the laughter of the others. But, after a few moments of comparison, I saw that my laughter did not resemble that of humans, that is to say that I was not laughing. I have seen men, with ugly heads and terrible eyes sunk in the dark orbit, surpass the hardness of rock, the rigidity of molten steel, the cruelty of the shark, the insolence of youth, the senseless fury of criminals, the treacheries of the hypocrite, the most extraordinary comedians, the power of character of priests, and the most hidden beings outside, the coldest of the worlds and of the sky ; To weary the moralists to uncover their hearts, and to bring down upon them the implacable wrath from above. I have seen them all at once, sometimes with their strongest fist directed towards heaven, like that of an already perverse child against its mother, probably excited by some spirit of hell, their eyes charged with a burning remorse as well as hatred, in an icy silence, not daring to emit the vast and ungrateful meditations that their bosom concealed, so full of injustice and horror, and to sadden with compassion the God of mercy; sometimes, at every moment of the day, from the beginning of childhood to the end of old age, spreading incredible anathemas, which had no common sense, against everything that breathes, against themselves and against providence, prostituting women and children, and thus dishonoring the parts of the body dedicated to modesty. Then, the seas raise their waters, swallow in their abysses the boards; the hurricanes, the earthquakes overturn the houses, the loss, the various diseases decimate the praying families. But men do not notice. I have seen them also blushing, pale with shame for their conduct on this earth; rarely. Storms, sisters of hurricanes; bluish firmament, whose beauty I do not admit; hypocritical sea, image of my heart; earth, with its mysterious bosom; inhabitants of the spheres; the whole universe; God, who created it with magnificence, it is you whom I invoke: show me a man who is good!… But, let your grace increase tenfold my natural forces; because, at the sight of this monster, I can die of astonishment; one dies at less.
Hungry love
Let us recall the names of these imaginary beings, with the nature of angel, that my pen, during the second song, drew from a brain, shining of a gleam emanating from themselves. They die, as soon as they are born, like these sparks of which the eye has difficulty in following the fast erasure, on burned paper. Léman!…
Lohengrin!… Lombano!… Holzer!… for a moment, you appeared, covered with the insignia of youth, on my charmed horizon; but, I let you fall back into the chaos, like bells of diver. You will not come out of it anymore. It is enough for me that I have kept your memory; you must give way to other substances, perhaps less beautiful, that will give birth to the stormy overflow of a love that has resolved not to quench its thirst with the human race. Hungry love, which would devour itself, if it did not seek its nourishment in the celestial fictions: creating, in the long run, a pyramid of seraphim, more numerous than the insects which swarm in a drop of water, it will intertwine them in an ellipse which it will make swirl around it. Meanwhile, the traveler, stopped against the aspect of a cataract, if he raises his face, will see, in the distance, a human being, carried towards the cellar of hell by a garland of living camellias! But… silence! the floating image of the fifth ideal draws itself slowly, like the indecisive folds of an aurora borealis, on the vaporous plane of my intelligence, and takes more and more a determined consistency… Mario and me we skirted the shore. Our horses, the tended neck, split the membranes of the space, and tore off sparks to the pebbles of the beach. The breeze, which struck us in full face, rushed in our coats, and made flutter back the hair of our twin heads. The seagull, with its cries and wing movements, strove in vain to warn us of the possible proximity of the storm, and cried out, “Where are they going, from this senseless gallop?”
