“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
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
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
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