Lautreamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works (Exact Change, 1994)«André Breton wrote that Maldoror is "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846), and early death in Paris (1870). Lautréamont's writings bewildered his contemporaries but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his lawless black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted slogan, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!" Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger." This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautréamont's writings available in English, in a superior translation.» - New York Times
"Lautréamont's style is hallucinatory, visionary. This new fluent translation makes clear its poetic texture and what may be termed its subversive attraction." - Washington Post Book World
«I'm absolutely mad on mad people. Some of my favourite artworks and novels appear to have been spewed from the hands and minds of mad folk, from Henry Darger to Alfred Jarry to Jean-Michel Basquiat, but none has made a more prominent dent on my brain than the Comte de Lautreamont's potty page-turner, Les Chants du Maldoror. It's like an old, twisted rulebook on how to break all literary rules.
It was only a handful of springtimes ago I discovered the book, daydreaming through my Surrealism lectures at the barmy Byam Shaw School of Art off Holloway Road. I'm sure André Breton would have approved. I was probably dreaming of lobsters or eyeballs getting sliced by razorblades, when we were given this hand-out with a quote from Maldoror: "He was... as beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table!" Just like that, I'd found a literary soul-mate.
You don't have to be mad to read Maldoror, but it helps. First published in 1865 - and devoured by the Surrealists - it is perhaps the most kaleidoscopic, stomach-churning piece of literature you'll ever come across, where sleepy hermaphrodites rub shoulders with randy octopuses and lice "as big as elephants". When Maldoror, the sadistic protagonist and master of disguises, isn't giving himself a Chelsea Smile, he's torturing people or having sex with a female shark (the only living creature with anything in common with him – a violent temperament).
What I love most is the way, back in the 1860s, Lautreamont wasn't afraid to unleash his deepest secret fantasies, however murky and disgraceful the realms of his mind might seem. Today, it irritates me how a lot of writers avoid getting their teeth into sex scenes or violence but gleefully describe a lovely walk in the park for five or so pages.
Maldoror's teeth chomp on many poor young boys' flesh in the book's six cantos, but his tongue remains firmly in his cheek. By the end, it's clear Maldoror's disregard for humankind is a metaphor for Lautreamont's disregard for the traditional novel. Phrases such as "handsome as the retractibility of claws in birds of prey" straddle madness and genius in such a way it makes me blush with reverence.
Whenever I feel inclined to reach for a crap literary cliché, I feel Maldoror breathing heavily on the back of my neck. While Lautreamont's filthy, rotten banquet may not be to everyone's taste, ultimately his writing aims to invigorate our dulled, softened literary appetites. In the introduction, the author gives a "warning to readers" that "the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve [your] soul as water does sugar". Those of you in the mood for a riotous orgy of cruelty and mayhem won't be disappointed. Lautreamont is the master of subversion. But young boys and female sharks, beware.» - Richard Milward
«Les Chants de Maldoror is based around a character called Maldoror, a figure of unrelenting evil who has forsaken God and humankind. The book combines an obscene and violent narrative with vivid and often surrealistic imagery.
The critic Alex De Jonge wrote:
'Lautreamont forces his readers to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and make them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake'.
Lautréamont’s writing is full of bizarre scenes, vivid imagery and drastic shifts in tone and style. There are heavy measures of black humor.
The six cantos are subdivided in 60 verses of different length (I/14, II/16, III/5, IV/8, V/7, VI/10), which were originally not numbered, but rather separated by lines. The final eight verses of the last canto form a small novel, and were marked with Roman numerals. Each canto closes with a line to indicate its end.
At the beginning and end of the cantos the text often refers to the work itself; Lautréamont also references himself in the capacity of the author of the work; Isidore is recognized as the "Montevidean." In order to enable the reader to realize that he is embarking on a "dangerous philosophical journey," Lautréamont uses stylistic means of identification with the reader, a procedure which Charles Baudelaire already used in his introduction of Les Fleurs du Mal. He also comments on the work, providing instructions for reading. The first sentence contains a "warning" to the reader:
God grant that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar (1,1).» - www.newworldencyclopedia.org
"Little is known of Ducasse's early childhood. At the age of thirteen, he was sent to France to acquire French education and training in engineering. Ducasse entered in 1859 the Imperial Lycée at Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrenées, probably spending his school holidays with his relatives in Bazet, his father's birthplace. Three years later he left the school, and in 1863 he entered the Lycée at Pau (now the Lycée Louis-Barthou).
At school Ducasse distinguished himself in arithmetic and drawing, but he was also noted for his extravagances of thought and style. One of his schoolfellows recalls that Ducasse's "own brand of madness revealed itself definitively in a French essay in which with a dreadful profusion of adjectives he'd seized the opportunity of accumulating the most horrible images of death." Gustave Hinstin, Ducasse's teacher, put him on detention for this essay. "Ducasse was deeply hurt by Hinstin's reproaches and this punishment."
After spending some years probably at Tardes, Ducasse visited Montevideo. According to Albert Lacroix, Ducasse's first publisher, he settled in Paris in 1867 intending to study at the Polytechnic or the College of Mining. He lived first in a hotel on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Financially he was still supported by his father. With the help of his generous allowance, Ducasse was able shut himself off from bourgeois society and devote himself entirely to writing. "He wrote only at night, seated at his piano," said Léon Genonceaux, who published Les Chants de Maldoror in 1890. "He used to declaim, would coin his phrases hammering out his tirades with the chords."
Ducasse's career lasted only two years. During this period he invented himself as an author and created his own aesthetic universe, by becoming in the beginning a published writer and self-confident breaker of taboos, and then a literary theorist and philosopher.
The first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror was published anonymously in Paris in 1868. It contained several references to Georges Dazet, Ducasse's friend at the lycée in Tarbet in 1861-62. In the second version of the canto, reprinted at Bordeaux in Evariste Carrance's anthology, Parfums de l'Ame (1869), his friend is simply "D..."
When the complete work was printed in 1869, Ducasse used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, borrowed from the hero of Eugène Sue's Latréaumont (1837), set in the days of Louis XIV. In this final version the "D..." had completely disappeared, and was replaced by different creatures from octopus to vampire bat.
From the very first lines Maldoror makes it clear that it was not written for the readers of Sue's popular novels: "May it please that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, finds without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages." Maldoror, the title character and a alter ego of the narrator, is a Luciferian rebel, a shapeshifter, who has chosen evil over good, but who at the same time suffers from cruelty and occasionally feels pity. In canto III Maldoror rapes a young girl, sets his bulldog on her, and then cuts open her vagina with a penknife. "From this enlarged trough he removed the internal organs, one after the other: the intestines, lungs, liver, and finally the heart itself were ripped from their roots and pulled out through the frightful aperture into the light of day."
Fearing prosecution, Ducasse's Belgian publisher refused to distribute the work to booksellers. Maldoror went nearly unnoticed by the public. Ducasse himself said in a letter, that "the whole thing went down the drain." Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had published Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, mentioned the author in his Bulletin trimestriel des Publications défendues en France, imprimées à l'Estranger (October 1869): "The author of this book is of no less rare a breed. Like Baudelaire, like Flaubert, he believes that the aesthetic expression of evil implies the most vital appreciation of good, the highest morality." And in the Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire the reviewer wrote that the book "will find a place among the bibliographical curiosities".
"To study evil so as to bring out the good is not to study good in itself. Given a suitable phenomenon, I shall seek its cause." (from Poésies, 1870)
In 1869 Ducasse moved to 32 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and next year to 15 Rue Vivienne, and then to a hotel on Faubourg-Montmartre. Between April and June 1870, he published two booklets of aphoristic prose pieces, Poésies, both printed by Balitout, Questroy et Cie. With Poésis Ducasse wanted to produce a counterpoint to the provocative and romantic theme of evil in Maldoror. "To sing of boredom, suffering, miseries, melancholies, death, darkness, the somber, etc., is wanting at all costs to look only at the puerile reverse of things," Ducasse wrote in a letter. "This is why I have completely changed methods, to sing exclusively only of hope, expectation, CALM, happiness, DUTY."
Ducasse died during the siege of Paris, on November 24, 1870. "I will leave no memoirs," Ducasse stated in Poésies. His body was buried in a temporary grave in the Cemetière du Nord. In 1871 his remnants were moved to another place in the cemetery. Maldoror was republished in 1890 but it received little notice until André Breton rescued his work from obscurity. Ducasse's often quoted simile, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!", become a definition of Surrealistic thought. Ducasse's work has also inspired a number of artists, including Salvador Dali's etchings from 1934 and Man Ray's 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse' (1920). Jeremy Reed's fictionalized biography, Isidore (1992), was based on the author's life.
After Maldoror was canonized as a work of genius, its shocking scenes have been regarded as the essential part of its construction and philosophy, like in the works of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, in Lautréamont Nomad (1994) Mark Polizzotti argued, "the average child, is capable of imagining worse" - which leaves open the question of whether it is an issue with regard to an average child. However, Maurice Blanchot has emphasized that Maldodor's sadism is far from Sade. "In Lautréamont, there is a natural rebellion against injustice, a natural tendency toward goodness, a powerful elation that is, from the start, characterized by neither perversion nor evil." (Lautréamont and Sade, 2004)
Ducasse mentions in a letter as his sources of inspiration the poetry of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Byron and Baudelaire. Les Chants de Maldoror was comprised of six cantos, in which the pseudo-aristocratic voice of the narrator expresses his deadpan disdain for the the mankind. "My poetry shall consists of attacks, by all means, upon that wild beast, man, and the Creator, who should never have begotten such vermin!" Full of contradiction, Maldoror mixes moralizing with macabre humor, warns of its corruptive power on its readers, but ends in catharsis, pretends to praise death, darkness, and cultural destruction, but basically re-established what it condemns. Many critics have discussed the autobiographical references given in the text and its homosexual elements. In canto IV Maldoror confesses, "I have always taken infamous fancy to the pale youngsters in schools and the sickly mill-children." However, the sparse self-references in Maldoror add little to what we know of the life of the author." - Petri Liukkonen
"The Comte de Lautréamont, whose real name was Isidore Ducasse, wrote only one novel: Les Chants De Maldoror which he published himself. He died a year later during the siege of Paris1870, alone and anonymous in his hotel room at 7 Faubourg-Montmartre. He was twenty four years old. On his death certificate the cause of death was listed as unknown. In his work he had written that he would leave no memoirs and that he knew his annihilation would be complete.
But Lautréamont's modesty, like his work, was constructed from the most toxic and delicious irony for in Maldoror, he had built a subversive device, half virus, half bomb, that would erode and disintegrate western literature. In Maldoror, Lautréamont takes the form of the 19th century Romantic novel and reanimates it like a demon possessing a corpse. The Songs are composed of complex and unstable allegorical narrative, shocking juxtapositions of language and image, breathtaking shifts in tone and style, endless sentences that wind and swerve and even deny their own subjects. And throughout there is the voice of Lautréamont. Sometimes a charming confidant, sometimes a delirious mystic or a bombastic lecturer, a penitent sinner, an angel, a deranged killer, a poet, the author of Romantic literature. Or perhaps it is Isidore Ducasse.
Both high literature and penny dreadful, Maldoror used plagiarism and collage before Dada. It was beloved and imitated by the Surrealists, revered by the Situationists and it was both Modernist and Postmodernist before Modernism. As decades pass the myths, the claims and the counter claims around the work of Isidore Ducasse shift and expand. Maldoror denies definition, it is ambivalent and unfinished. It is still dangerous." - http://bak.spc.org/maldoror/isidore.html
+ FILM:
"MALDOROR: The Last Film Ever Made
A feature film in twelve Super 8mm episodes made by and starring the no-torious no-bility of UNDERGROUND CINEMA • Kerri Sharp • Filmgruppe Abgedreht • Duncan Reekie • Caroline Kennedy • Colette Rouhier • Filmgruppe Chaos • Steven Eastwood • Jenigerfilm • Andrew Coram • Hant Film • Paul Tarrago • Jennet Thomas • German voice over Feridun Zaimoglu • English Voice over Duncan Reekie • Based on the novel by Isidore Ducasse a.k.a. the Comte de Lautreamont translated by Alexis Lykiard • Idea and Co-ordination by Duncan Reekie and Karsten Weber • 16mm post-production supported by Kulturelle Filmforderung Schleswig-Holstein e.V.
PLOT: Maldoror whose lips are sulphur, whose eyes are jasper, is stranded on Earth amongst the humanity he hates. His dark shadow haunts the day. At night he is pursued by phantoms and the memory of his unspeakable crimes. He searches the darkest secret corners of the world for revenge, for rest, for a companion. But he only ever finds horror, death and an endless battle against his arch enemy God and his loathsome Son. After an encounter with a festering angel, an amorous shark, a divine pubic hair and a dog on wheels, Maldoror embarks upon a course that leads inevitably to the final apocalyptic clash with the Creator himself !
FILM: In 1998 Duncan Reekie of the London Exploding Cinema Collective and Karsten Weber of the German Filmmgruppe Chaos got together and decided to make a Super 8 feature film of the infamous novel by Lautreamont. They selected around fifteen underground filmmakers/film groups from England and Germany and sent each one a chapter from the book and an invitation to make a film out of their chapter. Each maker could use different techniques, styles, actors and locations but there would be a voice over narration by one narrator over the entire feature.
There was no budget for the production, the filmmakers had to put up their own money, although Karsten managed to raise some post- production finance. The makers dug out their cameras, blackmailed their friends and relatives into assistance and began to shoot. Some of them studied the novel, some of them read their chapter once through and then immediately lost it. Film came back overexposed , underexposed, out of focus, friends split up, equipment broke down, an irreplaceable roll of film disappeared. Three filmmakers dropped out. Two years later the surviving twelve emerged bleary eyed from darkened attics and smoke filled cupboards with edited films which were then enlarged to 16mm and assembled into the feature length film.
Premiered in Germany in April 2000, Maldoror has hypnotised and thrilled both audiences and press.... a cult classic for the price of a second hand car.
The action takes place somewhere behind an impossible mesh of sex, violence, emulsion, bacteria, oil, bleach, petals, glue, dirt, abrasion, acid, superstition, glare, fur, insomnia, amphetamines and deep blue cold water. At first this mesh appears to be on the screen but slowly you realise that it is in fact behind your own eyes ! Despite its subject matter Maldoror is perhaps the most realistic feature film ever made, for although the big budget multiplex features strain with every tense and twisted fibre to conjure a world of carefree spontaneity they cannot compete with the reality of filmmakers who really don¹t give a fuck. Whilst the multiplex constructs its reality with narrative, style, action and music, Maldoror uses all these techniques but also adds real human conflict, chance, technical distortion, film surface scrimshaw, creative democracy and diversity. Maldoror does not just conjure the illusion of reality, it is actually real at the same time. Its got something that the multiplex cannot offer...... WILDNESS. We have identified a gap in the market and we have turned that gap into a terrible breach. Make no mistake once you have seen it all other films are meaningless. After Maldoror, filmmaking is no longer possible; in fact, it no longer has any purpose." - http://bak.spc.org/maldoror/maltext.html
"MALDOROR: The Last Film Ever Made
A feature film in twelve Super 8mm episodes made by and starring the no-torious no-bility of UNDERGROUND CINEMA • Kerri Sharp • Filmgruppe Abgedreht • Duncan Reekie • Caroline Kennedy • Colette Rouhier • Filmgruppe Chaos • Steven Eastwood • Jenigerfilm • Andrew Coram • Hant Film • Paul Tarrago • Jennet Thomas • German voice over Feridun Zaimoglu • English Voice over Duncan Reekie • Based on the novel by Isidore Ducasse a.k.a. the Comte de Lautreamont translated by Alexis Lykiard • Idea and Co-ordination by Duncan Reekie and Karsten Weber • 16mm post-production supported by Kulturelle Filmforderung Schleswig-Holstein e.V.
PLOT: Maldoror whose lips are sulphur, whose eyes are jasper, is stranded on Earth amongst the humanity he hates. His dark shadow haunts the day. At night he is pursued by phantoms and the memory of his unspeakable crimes. He searches the darkest secret corners of the world for revenge, for rest, for a companion. But he only ever finds horror, death and an endless battle against his arch enemy God and his loathsome Son. After an encounter with a festering angel, an amorous shark, a divine pubic hair and a dog on wheels, Maldoror embarks upon a course that leads inevitably to the final apocalyptic clash with the Creator himself !
FILM: In 1998 Duncan Reekie of the London Exploding Cinema Collective and Karsten Weber of the German Filmmgruppe Chaos got together and decided to make a Super 8 feature film of the infamous novel by Lautreamont. They selected around fifteen underground filmmakers/film groups from England and Germany and sent each one a chapter from the book and an invitation to make a film out of their chapter. Each maker could use different techniques, styles, actors and locations but there would be a voice over narration by one narrator over the entire feature.
There was no budget for the production, the filmmakers had to put up their own money, although Karsten managed to raise some post- production finance. The makers dug out their cameras, blackmailed their friends and relatives into assistance and began to shoot. Some of them studied the novel, some of them read their chapter once through and then immediately lost it. Film came back overexposed , underexposed, out of focus, friends split up, equipment broke down, an irreplaceable roll of film disappeared. Three filmmakers dropped out. Two years later the surviving twelve emerged bleary eyed from darkened attics and smoke filled cupboards with edited films which were then enlarged to 16mm and assembled into the feature length film.
Premiered in Germany in April 2000, Maldoror has hypnotised and thrilled both audiences and press.... a cult classic for the price of a second hand car.
The action takes place somewhere behind an impossible mesh of sex, violence, emulsion, bacteria, oil, bleach, petals, glue, dirt, abrasion, acid, superstition, glare, fur, insomnia, amphetamines and deep blue cold water. At first this mesh appears to be on the screen but slowly you realise that it is in fact behind your own eyes ! Despite its subject matter Maldoror is perhaps the most realistic feature film ever made, for although the big budget multiplex features strain with every tense and twisted fibre to conjure a world of carefree spontaneity they cannot compete with the reality of filmmakers who really don¹t give a fuck. Whilst the multiplex constructs its reality with narrative, style, action and music, Maldoror uses all these techniques but also adds real human conflict, chance, technical distortion, film surface scrimshaw, creative democracy and diversity. Maldoror does not just conjure the illusion of reality, it is actually real at the same time. Its got something that the multiplex cannot offer...... WILDNESS. We have identified a gap in the market and we have turned that gap into a terrible breach. Make no mistake once you have seen it all other films are meaningless. After Maldoror, filmmaking is no longer possible; in fact, it no longer has any purpose." - http://bak.spc.org/maldoror/maltext.html
