My Blog List

Thursday, June 25, 2015

=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=



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.”



No comments:

Post a Comment