He was a young man of savage and unexpected originality, a diseased
genius and, quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane and in
their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the
madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form and not
the quality of the intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been
bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume and all the
savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.
Such was the adventure of the amazing stranger, self-adorned with this
romantic pseudonym: Comte de Lautréamont. He was born at Montevideo
in April, 1846, and died at the age of twenty-eight, having published
the _Chants de Maldoror_ and _Poésies,_ a collection of thoughts and
critical notes of a literature less exasperated and even, here and
there, too wise. We know nothing of his brief life: he seems to have
had no literary connection, the numerous friends apostrophized in his
dedications bearing names that have remained secrets.
The _Chants de Maldoror_ is a long poem in prose whose six first chants
only were written. It is probable that Lautréamont, though living,
would not have continued them. We feel, in proportion as we finish the
reading of the volume, that consciousness is going, going--and when
it returns to him, several months before his death, he composes the
_Poésies_, where, among very curious passages, is revealed the state of
mind of a dying man who repeats, while disfiguring them in fever, his
most distant memories, that is to say, for this infant, the teachings
of his professors!
A motive the more why these chants surprise. It was a magnificent,
almost inexplicable stroke of genius. Unique this book will remain,
and henceforth it remains added to the list of works which, to the
exclusion of all classicism, forms the scanty library and the sole
literature admissible to those minds, oddly amiss, that are denied the
joys, less rare, of common things and conventional morality.
The worth of the _Chants de Maldoror_ is not in pure imagination:
fierce, demoniac, disordered or exasperated with arrogance in
crazy visions, it terrifies rather than charms; then, even in
unconsciousness, there are influences that can be determined. "O Nights
of Young," the author exclaims in his verses, "what sleep you have cost
me!" And here and there he is swayed by the romantic extravagances of
such English fictionists as were still read in his time, Anne Radcliffe
and Maturin (whom Balzac esteemed), Byron, also by the medical reports
on eroticism, and finally by the bible. He certainly had read widely,
and the only author he never quotes, Flaubert, must never have been far
from his reach.
This worth I would like to make known, consists, I believe, in
the novelty and originality of the images and metaphors, by their
abundance, the sequence logically arranged like a poem, as in the
magnificent description of a shipwreck, where all the verses (although
no typographie artifice betokens them) end thus: "The ship in distress
fires cannon shots of alarm; but it founders slowly ... majestically."
So, too, the litanies of the Ancient Ocean: "Ancient Ocean, your
waters are bitter. I greet you, Ancient Ocean. Ancient Ocean, O great
celibate, when you course the solemn solitudes of your phlegmatic
realms ... I greet you, Ancient Ocean." Here are other images:
"like a corner, as far as the eye can reach, where shivering cranes
deliberate much, and soar sturdily in winter athwart the silence."
And this terrifying invocation: silk-eyed octopus. To describe men he
uses expressions of a Homeric suggestiveness: narrow-shouldered men,
ugly-headed men, lousy-haired men, the man with pupils of jasper,
red-shanked men. Others have a violence magnificently obscene: "He
returns to his terrified attitude and continues to watch, with a
nervous trembling, the male hunt, and the great lips of the vagina of
gloom, whence ceaselessly flow, like a river, immense dark spermatazoae
which take their flight in the desolate ether, concealing entire nature
with the vast unfolding of their bat wings, and the solitary legions of
octopuses, saturnine and doleful at watching these hollow inexpressible
fulgurations." (1868: so that one cannot class them as phrases fancied
from some print of Odilon Redon). But what a theme, on the other hand,
what a story for the master of retrograde forms, of fear and the
amorphous stirrings of beings that are near--and what a book, written,
we might say, to tempt him!
Here is a passage, at once quite characteristic of Lautréamont's talent
and of his mental malady:
"With slow steps the brother of the blood-sucker (Maldoror)
marched through the forest.... Then he cried: 'Man, when
you come upon a dead dog, pressed against a milldam so as
to prevent it from issuing, go not like the others, and
take with your hands the worms that flow from his swollen
belly, considering it with astonishment, opening a knife,
and then cutting a great number of them from the body, as
you repeat that you too will be no more than this dog. What
mystery seek you? Neither I nor the four fins of the sea
bear of the Northern Seas have succeeded in solving the
problem of life.... Who is this being, near the horizon,
that fearlessly approaches, with troubled oblique bounds?
And what majesty blended with serene gentleness! His gaze,
though kind, is piercing. His enormous eyelids play with
the breeze and appear alive. He is unknown to me. My body
trembles as he fixes his monstrous eyes on me. Something
like a dazzling aureole of light plays around him.... How
fair he is.... You should be powerful, for you have a
form more than human, sad as the universe, beautiful as
suicide.... How! ... it is you, toad!... great toad ...
unfortunate toad!... Pardon!... What do you on this earth
where are the accursed? But what have you done with your
viscous fetid pustules to have such a sweet air? I saw you
when you descended from above, poor toad! I was thinking
of infinity, and at the same time of my weakness....
Since then you have appeared to me monarch of the ponds
and marshes! Covered with a glory which belongs only to
God, you have departed thence, leaving me consoled, but
my staggering reason founders before such grandeur....
Fold your white wings and gaze not from on high with those
troubled eyes." The toad rests on its hind legs (which
resemble those of a man) and, while the slugs, woodles,
and snails flee at the sight of their mortal enemy, gives
utterance to those words: "Hearken, Maldoror. Notice my
figure, calm as a mirror.... I am but a simple dweller
of the reeds, 'tis true, but thanks to your own contact,
taking of good only what is in yourself, my reason has
grown and I can converse with you.... As for myself, I
should prefer to have protruding eyes, my body lacking feet
and hands, to have killed a man, than to be as you are. For
I hate you! Adieu, then, hope not to find again the toad in
your passage. You have been the cause of my death. I leave
for eternity, to implore pardon for you."
Alienists, had they studied this book, would have classified the author
among those aspiring to pass for persecuted persons: in the world he
only sees himself and God--and God thwarts him. But we might also
inquire whether Lautréamont is not a superior ironist, a man forced by
a precious scorn for mankind to feign a madness whose incoherence is
wiser and more beautiful than the average reason. There is the madness
of pride; there is the delirium of mediocrity. How many balanced and
honest pages, of good and clear literature, would I not give for this,
for these words and phrases under which he seems to have wished to
inter reason herself! The following is taken from the singular _Poésies_:
"The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths,
exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of
negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will,
torments, destruction, confusions, tears, insatiabilities,
servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected,
the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious
vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead
illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, the darkness
of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the
innoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires,
betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies,
aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors,
strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to
experience, cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals
that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of
sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious,
childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the
Courts of Assize, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes
forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of
hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks,
simoom of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic,
squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic,
viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac,
anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino,
pédéraste, phenomena of the aquarium and the bearded woman,
hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies,
acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure,
that which does not think like a child, desolation, the
intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of
the camelias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope
of nothingness and scorning himself with joyous cries,
remorse, hypocrisies, vague vistas that grind one in their
imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate
maxims, vermin and their insinuating titillations, stupid
prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin
and Dumas _fils_, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies,
suffocation, stifling, mania,--before these unclean charnel
houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react
against whatever disgusts us and bows us down." Maldoror
(or Lautréamont) seems to have judged himself in making
himself apostrophised thus by his enigmatic Toad: "Your
spirit is so diseased that it perceives nothing; and you
deem it natural each time there issues from your mouth
words that are senseless, though full of an infernal
grandeur."