It was late November, 1870. Napoleon III, who’d marched off
to war against Prussia that summer, had been captured and the tide of victory
had turned. Now the Prussians were laying siege to Paris. For two months
conditions in the city had been steadily worsening. Food and medicine were scarce, disease was running rampant,
and the people were growing desperate. In a not-so-clean hotel room, a young
poet had lain sick with fever for days. Sometime on the morning of November 24,
he died. Fearing epidemic, the authorities had the body quickly buried in a
provisional grave.
In one of the few works he had time to write in his short
life, Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the pen name Comte De Lautreamont,
declared “I will leave no memoirs behind.” What little we know of his life must
necessarily be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle with three-quarters of the
pieces missing and the pieces that remain colored by his mythologizing
imagination.
I won’t even bother to reprise here his famous quote about
the sewing machine and the dissecting table. Just look around you. It’s been
behind a great deal of what we today take for granted as “beauty” in the arts from
the Surrealists to the present day.
Isidore was born in Uruguay to a French consular officer on
November 16, 1847. His mother died shortly after he was born.
He went to high school in France. He could speak French,
English and Spanish.
He was described by his publisher as “large, dark,
beardless, mercurial, neat, and industrious.” He was said to compose his work
while seated at the piano, banging the keys, and yelling out verses inspired by
the wild sounds.
His most famous work, The Chants of Maldoror, is arguably the
most transgressive text ever accepted into the literary canon. It’s an attempt
at unexpurgated “celebration” of total evil, narrated with a great deal of
black humor and irony by a cold-blooded, nihilistic would-be super-being who
revels in detailed descriptions of violence, sadism, blasphemy, pederasty,
perversion, and murder.
With indignation Maldoror reluctantly acknowledges, “I am
the son of a man and a woman, from what I have been told. This astonishes me. I
believed I was something more.”
Are his chants a dream-fulfillment? An intimation of the
outrages he would commit if only he possessed the infinite satanic power
necessary to fulfill them? Are they an earlier expression of what Bataille
meant when the latter wrote “I have in mind an obscenity so great I could vomit
the most dreadful words and it wouldn’t be enough!”? Are they an expression, in
other words, of the despair of a transgressor who, being only mortal, can never
transgress enough?
“Oh if only instead of being a hell,” Maldoror laments, “the
universe had been an immense anus!”
What, it’s not?
He was Dada before there was a Dada: “Neither I nor the four
flippers of the sea-bear of the Boreal ocean have been able to solve the riddle
of life.”
He was master of the “surreal” metaphor before there was
even a surrealism: “O Ocean, you remind me somewhat of the bluish marks one
sees on the battered backs of cabin boys.”
He was three years younger than Nietzsche when he wrote the
words “Love of justice is for most men only the courage to suffer injustice”
and “When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into the rivers of
the blood of cannon-blasted bodies.”
He developed a theory on the use of plagiarism and
appropriation to create new works a hundred years before the Situationists and contemporary
conceptual writers made such practices avant garde.
Ducasse out-Rimbauded Rimbaud. And, when all is said and
done, he had arguably a greater, deeper, and more lasting influence on the
course of literature than the more celebrated, more “romantic” Rimbaud.
“Farewell until eternity,” Lautreamont said in anticipation
of his death, “where you and I shall not find ourselves together.”
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