Lautréamont, comte de (pseud. of Isidore Ducasse) (1846-70). Prose poet. Haloed in eldritch glamour, the Montevideo-born Ducasse is one of the maudits of French literature, his premature death a sign, however, that he was beloved at least by gods of the savage sort. So little indeed is known about his brief life that his writing appears almost as the work of some unknown midnight taggeur, whose moving finger wrote and having writ moved on.
Printed in 1868-9 (but published in full only in 1874), his six Chants de Maldoror, written in prose, celebrate the unbridled predatory misdeeds of a prowler monster whose shape is as indefinite as his age. ‘Peindre les délices de la cruauté’ is the avowed intention, and the reader is engulfed in a flux of nightmarish scenarios that unfurls with a strangely rhythmic insistence. Gothic paraphernalia and a grotesque menagerie of animal metamorphoses underpin a vision of man once innocent but now transmogrified into a wild beast. Male adolescents are the preferred prey, charmed, abducted, and destroyed in an atmosphere of psychopathic mayhem that smacks of the homosexual, but equally subverts any such inference. Meanwhile Lautréamont's eccentric vision unleashes images of uninhibited novelty with dislocatory pre- Surrealist similes that still astonish.
However, behind this apparently spontaneous pageant of the subconscious at play is a writer in full control of the effects he wishes to create. The Chants is a discreetly self-conscious text which busies itself periodically with the problems of its own organization, recognizes the weirdness of its manner, and is alive to varieties of reader response. From time to time the writer teasingly collapses the terrors he creates. Some of his artifices, borrowed from the roman-feuilleton, from medical treatises, or popular scientific magazines, he deliberately makes apparent, and a parodic understanding often infiltrates our reading.
This vein of parody governs his Poésies (1870), which appeared in the year of his death in Paris. They are in two parts, are not poetry, and represent a curious and possibly suspect volte-face in relation to the Chants. The first section is a brief ars poetica in prose rejecting Romanticism and all its rites and writers. The second is largely an unattributed collection of maxims, sayings, and texts by classical authors, rewritten in such a way as to divert or destabilize their original meaning. The technique is an interesting early form of deconstruction but makes disjointed reading. It is for the wild, worrying beauty of the Chants de Maldoror, a reservoir for many of the resources of later modern writing, that the darkly fulgurant Ducasse is remembered.
[David Steel]
Bibliography
- M. Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade (1949)
- G. Bachelard, Lautréamont (1956)
- M. Philip, Lectures de Lautréamont (1971)
- A. de Jonge, Nightmare Culture (1973)
