Comte de Lautréamont

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Comte de Lautréamont was the pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (April 4, 1846 – November 24, 1870), a French poet whose only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, and in particular on the Surrealist and Situationist movements.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Youth 1.2 Years in Paris 1.3 Early death 2 Les Chants de Maldoror 2.1 Quote 3 Surrealism 4 Bibliography 4.1 Works by Lautréramont 4.2 Translations 4.3 Secondary literature 5 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Youth

Ducasse was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to François Ducasse and Jacquette-Célestine Davezac, a French Consular Officer and his wife. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November 1847 in the cathedral of Montevideo, and that his mother died shortly afterwards, probably due to an epidemic disease. In 1851, he experienced as a five-year-old the end of the eight-year siege of Montevideo in the Argentine-Uruguayan war, whose cruelties he certainly came to know in detail. He was brought up in three languages, French, Spanish and English, which later made reading in those languages possible.

In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, Isidore was sent by his father to high school in France, where he was trained at the imperial lycée in Tarbes (Hautes Pyrénées) in French education and technology. Afterwards he attended the lycée Louis Barthou in Pau (Aquitaine) in 1863. He attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy (under and uppergreat), did well in arithmetic and drawing, and already showed extravagance in thinking and style. He read Edgar Allan Poe, and particularly devoured Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de Musset, and Baudelaire. In school he was fascinated by Racine and Corneille, and especially by the scene of the blinding in Sophokles' "Oedipus the King". According to his schoolmate Paul Lespès he showed obvious folly "by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images" in an essay. For that he was put into detention by his teacher Gustave Hinstin, which had a depressing effect on the young Isidore. After graduation he lived in Tarbes, where he started a close friendship with Georges Dazet, the son of his guardian, and decided to become a writer.

[edit] Years in Paris

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After a short stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse settled down in Paris at the end of 1867, studied at the École Polytechnique, only to give it up one year later. Continuous allowances from his father made it possible for Ducasse to stay away from social driving in Paris, and dedicate himself completely to his passion, writing. He lived in the quarter of the intellectuals and large boulevards, in a hotel in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Nr. 23, and intensively worked on the first canto, which he had probably begun before his passage to Montevideo, and continued during his ocean journey. He was a frequent guest in the nearby libraries, where he read literature of Romanticism, and, in addition, scientific works and encyclopaedias, from which he partly quoted literally. The publisher Léon Genonceaux described him as "large, dark, young man, beardless, mercurial, neat and industrious" and reports that Ducasse wrote "only at night, sitting at his piano, declaiming wildly while striking the keys, and hammering out ever new verses to the sounds".

In autumn 1868, Ducasse anonymously and at his own expense published the first canto of "Les Chants de Maldoror" (Chant premiere, par ***), a booklet of thirty-two pages, and a bold, taboo-breaking poem on pain and cruelty, which at the same time is a text of unparalleled beauty, greatness and elevation. Such amazing phenomena of evil are specified in that in fact it is considered one of the most radical works in literature.

On November 10th, 1868, Isidore Ducasse sent a letter to the poet Victor Hugo, to which he attached two copies of the first canto, and in which he asked for a recommendation letter for further publication. A new edition of the first canto appeared at the end of January, 1869 in the anthology "Parfums de l'Ame" in Bordeaux. Here Isidore Ducasse used his pseudonym "Comte de Lautréamont" for the first time. It is based on the character of Latréaumont from a popular French 1837 gothic novel by Eugène Sue, which featured a haughty and blasphemous anti-hero similar in some ways to Lautréamont's Maldoror. Lautréamont probably paraphrased the title as l'autre Amon (the other Amon - the angel of evil). Following other interpretations it stands for "the other side of the river" (l'autre Amont).^{[citation needed]}

The total of six cantos was to be published in late summer 1869 by Albert Lacroix in Brussels, who had also published Eugène Sue. The book was already printed when Lacroix refused the distribution to the booksellers as he feared prosecution for blasphemy or obscenity. The reason Ducasse saw in the fact, "that life in it is painted in too harsh colors." (letter to the banker Darasse from March 12th, 1870)

Ducasse urgently asked the publisher Auguste Poulet Malassis who had published Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal ("The Flowers of Evil") in 1857, to send copies of his book to the critics since they alone could judge "the commence of a publication which will see its end only later, and after I will have seen mine." He tried to explain his position, and even offered to change some "too strong" points in coming editions:

"I have written of evil as Mickiewickz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire and others have all done. Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy. Thus it is always, after all, the good which is the subject, only the method is more philosophical and less naive than that of the old school. (...) Is that the evil? No, certainly not." (letter from October 23rd 1869)

Poulet Malassis announced the forthcoming publication of the book the same month in his literary magazine "Quarterly Review of Publications banned in France and printed abroad", otherwise nobody took notice of the book. Only the "Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire" noticed lapidary in May, 1870 "the book will probably find a place under the bibliographic curiosities".

[edit] Early death

From spring 1869 on Ducasse frequently changed his domicile, from Rue du Faubourg Montmartre 3 to Rue Vivienne 15, and afterwards moved back to Rue Faubourg Montmartre and lodged there in a hotel at Nr. 7. While still waiting for the distribution of his book, Ducasse worked on a new text, a follow-up to his "phenomenological description of evil", in which he wanted to sing of good. The two works should form a whole, a dialectic of good and evil. The work, however, remained a fragment.

In April and June, 1870, Ducasse at least published the first two instalments of what was clearly meant to be a serial publication as preface to the planned "chants of the good" in two small brochures, Poésies I and II, under his real name, this time discarding his pseudonym. He differentiated the two parts of his work with the terms "philosophy" and "poetry", and announced under the premise that the starting point of a fight against evil was the reversal:

"I replace melancholy by courage, doubt by certainty, despair by hope, malice by good, complaints by duty, scepticism by faith, sophisms by cool equanimity and pride by modesty".

At the same time it took up texts of famous authors which he cleverly inverted, corrected and plagiarized them openly: "plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author's sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea." Among them were above all Blaise Pascal's "Pensées" and La Rochefoucauld's Maximes, in addition the work of Jean de La Bruyère and Marquis de Vauvenargues, Dante, Kant and La Fontaine and even improvement of his own "Les Chant de Maldoror". The brochures of aphoristic prose did not have "a price" -- each subscriber could decide which sum they wanted to pay for it.

On 19 July 1870 Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, and, after the capture of Napoleon III, Paris was besieged on September 17th, a situation which Ducasse was already familiar with from his early childhood in Montevideo. The living conditions worsened rapidly during the siege, and according to the owner of the hotel Ducasse got sick with a "bad fever".

Lautréamont died at the age of twenty-four on November 24th, 1870 at eight o'clock in the morning in his hotel. On his death certificate it read except for the life data: "no further information". Since one was afraid of epidemics in besieged Paris, Ducasse was buried the next day after a service in Notre Dame de Lorette in a provisional grave at the Cemetière du North. In January 1871 his body was put into another grave.

In his "Poésies" Lautréamont announced: "I will leave no memoirs", and so the life of the mysterious creator of the "Les Chant du Maldoror" remains mysterious and impenetrable.

[edit] Les Chants de Maldoror

Les Chants de Maldoror is based around a character called Maldoror, a figure of unrelenting evil who has forsaken God and mankind. The book combines an obscene and violent narrative with vivid and often surrealistic imagery.

The critic Alex De Jonge writes, "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." (De Jonge, p. 1)

The six cantos are subdivided in 60 verses of different length (I/14, II/16, III/5, IV/8, V/7, VI/10), which originally have not been numbered but separated by lines. The last eight verses of the last canto form a small novel, and were marked with Roman numerals. Each canto closes with a line indicating its end.

At the beginning and at the end of the cantos the text often refers to the work itself, Lautréamont also speaks with reference to the actual author Isidore Ducasse who is recognized as the "Montevidean". In order to enable the reader to realise that he is embarking on a "dangerous philosophical journey", Lautréamont uses the stylistic means of the identification of the reader in the text with the actual reader of the book, a procedure which Baudelaire already used in his introduction of "Les Fleurs du Mal" (The Flowers of Evil). Ducasse comments on the work, too, providing instructions for its reading. Already 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)

Lautréamont’s writing is full of bizarre scenes, vivid imagery and drastic shifts in tone and style. There are heavy measures of black humor; De Jonge argues that Maldoror reads like "a sustained sick joke." (De Jonge, p. 55)

Invoking an obscure clause in the French civil code, New York performance artist Shishaldin has recently petitioned the French government for permission to posthumously marry the author.

[edit] Quote

• « Arithmétique ! Algèbre ! Géometrie ! Trinité grandiose ! Triangle lumineux ! Celui qui ne vous a pas connues est un insensé ! »

Translation: "Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Grandiose trinity! Luminous triangle! Whoever has not known you is without sense!"

• « la grande famille universelle des humains est une utopie digne de la logique la plus médiocre. »

• "Poetry must be made by all and not by one."

[edit] Surrealism

During World War I French writer Philippe Soupault coincidentally discovered in the mathematical department of a small bookshop near the military hospital in which he was admitted to in Paris in 1917 a copy of "Les Chants de Maldoror". In his memoirs Soupault wrote:

"To the light of a candle which was permitted to me, I began the reading. It was like an enlightenment. In the morning I read the "Chants" again, convinced that I had dreamed... The day after André Breton came to visit me. I gave him the book and asked him to read it. The following day he brought it back, equally enthusiastic as I had been."

Through this coincidence Lautréamont revealed itself the Surrealist group, soon they called him their prophet. As one the poètes maudit (French: accursed poets) he was taken up to the Surrealist Panthéon besides Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and was acknowledged as being a direct precursor to surrealism. André Gide regarded it the most significant merit of Aragon, Breton and Soupault, "to have recognized and announced the literary and ultra-literary importance of the amazing Lautréamont". He regarded Lautréamont - even more than Rimbaud - "gate-master of tomorrow's literature".

Louis Aragon and André Breton discovered the only copies of the "Poésies" in the National Library of France and published the text in April and May 1919 in two sequential editions of their magazine "Literature". In 1925 a special edition of the Surrealist magazine "Le Disque vert" was dedicated to Lautréamont under the title "Le cas Lautréamont" (The Lautréamont case). It was the 1927 publication by Philippe Soupault and Andre Breton that assured Lautreamont a permanent place in French literature and the status of patron saint to the Surrealist movement. Numerous Surrealist writers paid homage to Lautréamont subsequently, in 1940 André Breton incorporated him into his "Anthology of black Humour".

The title of an object by American artist Man Ray called L'énigme d'Isidore Ducasse (The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920) contains a reference to the famous line in the 6th canto where Lautréamont described the beauty of a young boy as "the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table".

"Maldoror" inspired many artists: Fray De Geetere, Salvador Dalí, Jacques Houplain and Rene Magritte illustrated complete editions, later also Georg Baselitz. Individual works have been done by Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Oscar Dominguez, Espinoza, André Masson, Joan Miró, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann und Yves Tanguy. The artist Amedeo Modigliani always carried a copy of the book with him and used to walk around Montparnasse, quoting from Maldoror.

In direct reference to Lautréamont's "chance meeting on a dissection table" Max Ernst defined the structure of the surrealist painting: „Accouplement de deux réalités en apparence inaccouplables sur un plan qui en apparence ne leur convient pas.”

Félix Vallotton and Salvador Dalí made "imaginary" portraits of Lautréamont, since no photo was available.

A portion of the work is recited toward the end of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967).

Guy Debord developes a section from Poésies II as thesis 207 in Society of the Spectacle: Ideas improve. The meaning of words participate in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Works by Lautréramont

• Les Chants de Maldoror - Chant premier, par ***, Imprimerie Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris, August 1868 (1st canto, published anonymously)
• Les Chants de Maldoror - Chant premier, par Comte de Lautréamont, in: „Parfums de l'Ame“ (Anthology, edited by Evariste Carrance), Bordeaux 1869 (1st canto, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont)
• Les Chants de Maldoror, A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, Brussels 1869 (first complete edition, not delivered to the booksellers)
• Poésies I, Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870
• Poésies II, Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870
• Les Chants de Maldoror, Typ. De E. Wittmann, Paris and Brussels 1874 (1869's complete edition, with new cover)
• Les Chants de Maldoror, preface by Léon Genonceaux, with a letter by Lautréamont, Ed. Léon Genonceaux, 1890 (new edition)
• Les Chants de Maldoror. with 65 illustrations by Frans De Geetere, Ed. Henri Blanchetièr, Paris 1927
• Les Chants de Maldoror. with 42 illustrations by Salvador Dalí; Albert Skira Editeur, Paris 1934
• Œuvres Complètes. with a preface by André Breton und illustrations by Victor Brauner, Oscar Dominguez, Max Ernst, Espinoza, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray, Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy, G.L.M. (Guy Levis Mano), Paris 1938
• Maldoror, with 27 illustrations by Jacques Houplain, Societe de Francs-Bibliophiles, Paris 1947
• Les Chants de Maldoror. with 77 illustrations by Rene Magritte; Editions De „La Boetie“, Brussels 1948
• Œuvres complètes. Fac-similés des éditions originales. La Table Ronde, Paris 1970 (facsimiles of the original editions)
• Œuvres complètes, based on the edition of 1938, with all historical prefaces by Léon Genonceaux (Édition Genouceaux, Paris 1890), Rémy de Gourmont (Édition de la Sirène, Paris 1921), Edmond Jaloux (Edition Librairie José Corti, Paris, April 1938), Philippe Soupault (Edition Charlot, Paris, 1946) Julien Gracq (La Jeune Parque, Paris 1947), Roger Caillois (Edition Librairie José Corti 1947), Maurice Blanchot (Édition du Club Français du Livre, Paris 1949), Edition Librairie José Corti, Paris 1984

[edit] Translations

• Maldoror. Translated by Guy Wernham ; New Directions Publishing Corporation ; 1943 ; 0-8112-0082-5
• Lautreamont's Maldoror ; Translated by Lykiard (Alexis) ; London ; Allison & Busby ; 1983 ; VI, 218 p.
• Maldoror (and the Complete works of the Comte de Lautréamont); Exact Change; Cambridge, MA ; 1994 ; Translation into English by Alexis Lykiard with updated notes and bibliography by Lykiard, as well ; ISBN 1-878972-12-X
• Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror) ; Thomas Y. Crowell Company ; New York ; 1970 ; English translation by Alexis Lykiard
• Maldoror ; Allison and Busby ; London ; 1983 ; Translation by Alexis Lykiard ; ISBN 0-85031-084-9
• Maldoror ; Penguin Books ; "Penguin Classics" series ; Great Britain ; 1977 ; Fourth English translation (after Rodker, Wernham and Lykiard, respectively) by Paul Knight. Also contains "Poesies" and several "lettres". Extensive introduction by translator
• Maldoror and Poems ; Penguin Books ; New York ; 1988 ; Translated by Paul Knight ; Introduction by Paul Knight. Cover illustration is a color reproduction of Antoine Wiertz' "Buried Alive" (detail) ; 288 p. ; 0-14-044342-8

[edit] Secondary literature

There is a wealth of Lautréamont criticism, interpretation and analysis in French (including an esteemed biography by Jean-Jacques Lefrère), but little in English.

• Le Cas Lautréamont, special edition of „Le Disque Vert“, with an introduction by André Gide, and texts by Philippe Soupault, René Crevel, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Herbert Read, Albert Thibaudet, André Breton, Marcel Arland, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Valery, Paul Eluard, Henri Michaux, Jean Cocteau, Léon Bloy, Remy de Gourmont, André Malraux a.o., and a portrait by Odilon-Jean Périer; René van den Berg, Paris/Brussels 1925
• The Lay of Maldoror ; The Casanova Society ; London ; 1924 ; First English translation is by John Rodker ; Illustrated with 3 plates by Odilon Redon
• Jeremy Reed: Isidore: A Novel about the Comte de Lautreamont, Peter Owen Limited 1991 (fictional biography)
• Alex de Jonge. Nightmare Culture: Lautréamont and Les Chants de Maldoror, Secker and Warburg, 1973: Creation Books 2007 1840681268
• Maurice Blanchot: Lautreamont and Sade. Meridian, Stanford University Press
• Peter W. Nesselroth: "Lautréamont's Imagery: a stylistic approach" Geneva:Droz, 1969

[edit] External links

• http://www.cavi.univ-paris3.fr/phalese/Maldororhtml/documents/Biographie.htm (French)
• Comte de Lautréamont — Les Chants de Maldoror (French)
• English translation of three stanzas by Sonja Elen Kisa with visual art by François Aubéron
• Maldoror: Le Site (French)
• http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/sable/recherche/catalogues/lautreamont/index.htm (French)
• Works by Comte de Lautréamont at Project Gutenberg