June 2023. The Songs of Maldoror by Comte De Lautréamont
1869, Elektron eBooks, 312 pages. Written in French, read in English.
The book begins with a warning: Turn back. Advising the reader to turn back at this point, while nothing yet was revealed and nothing yet was lost, is always a good incentive to continue reading, fueled by the curiousity of just what is it that the reader is warned to turn back from. However, revisiting this first warning from across the other side of the book, maybe that was sound advice.
The Songs of Maldoror is a book that is divided into six cantos, only one of which has any semblance of narrative. The rest are meandering, stream of consciousness, passages describing the travails of what I can only describe as a being of pure evil, ensconced in a young man in Paris of the nineteenth century. The main vehicle of the book, the main purpose of it, is to go against everything that is civil, in order to describe and to shock, as much as possible, the reader. A man flayed alive to spare a prostitute from having a similar fate? Check. A giant beetle rolling a giant ball of excrement? That too. Also a man hung by his hair, his scalp slowly detaching itself from the rest of his head. Everything that you can hope for, everything that you cling to that is guaranteed as part of a civilized society, is stripped away from this book. Maldoror will murder, and maim, and perform horrible crimes, and will shrug his shoulders and move forwards into the Parisian night.
The Songs of Maldoror was an incredible influence on surrealist artists and writers of latter years. The novelty of it was not the portrayal of the absence of virtue in a hellish environment — Bosch and Dürer, father and son, were all there to portray it before him — but the portrayal of the absence of structure. The descriptions in the book, very often, portray a world in which any semblance of normalcy is stripped away to reveal the chaos of uncontrolled randomness. In this kind of world, watches will melt. Pigs will indeed fly.
As much as there is a sense of mystery about the origin and structure of the book, there is also a sense of mystery about its author. Comte De Lautréamont is a pseudonym that Isidore Ducasse has chosen for himself — even the name itself (his pseudonym indicates “the other upstream” in French, which may suggest the other side of the river. It can also refer to his being a foreigner in Paris — the name can suggest “the stranger from Montevideo” — his birthplace; Maldoror suggests bad sleep in French) is another layer, another hint as to his intentions. Ducasse lived a solitary life in which he has written and published only two works, and died at the age of 24, in a hotel room, and buried in an unmarked grave the next day. His Father, arriving from Uruguay to sort out his affairs, did not choose to inter him somewhere else and so, even Ducasse’s bones are lost to history, buried beneath an apartment building. There is not a single verified picture of him, and he has not written a word of biography. The only things we can measure him by are his two works.
The Songs of Maldoror, however, is not an attempt at exorcism. It does not appear through the long passages that Ducasse had thoughts of strolling through the streets of Paris and performing the same atrocities, the inhabitants of Paris unwittingly only have his pen and his notebook to thank for their security. It appears that it was more of an exercise on the part of Ducasse — of Lautréamont — to stretch the ability to write freely, without the constraints of civilized culture, and see how far he would be able to arrive without censorship clamping down on his creative outlet. While it appears he was fearful of the legal repercautions — publishing the full work only in Belgium, with the publisher refusing to print a full run of the books — at least the publication of the first canto in France came without any shockwaves. Ducasse may have chosen to publish his work in the right country — a country that takes a work of art at face value, and evaluates it merely for what it attempts to do — stretch the boundaries of what can be called literature, what can be called art. And in that, Lautréamont had his great victory, a victory that we enjoy to this day due to Dali, to Modigliani, to Magritte.
The July 2023 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes.
