Literature and the Gods

IV. Musings of a Serial Killer

There is a point in the nineteenth century when a secret nadir is reached. It occurs, but without anybody’s noticing, when a young man no one has heard of publishes, in Paris and at his own expense, a work entitled Les Chants de Maldoror. The year is 1869: Nietzsche is working on The Birth of Tragedy; Flaubert publishes L’Education sentimentale, Verlaine his Fêtes galantes; Rimbaud is writing his first lines. But at the same time something even more drastic is going on: it’s as if literature had delegated to the young son of the consulate employee Ducasse, a boy sent to France from Montevideo to complete his studies, the task of carrying out a decisive, clandestine, and violent act. The twenty-three-year-old Isidore assumes the pseudonym Lautréamont, a name probably suggested by a character in the pages of Eugène Sue, and pays an initial deposit of four hundred francs to the publisher Lacroix to have him print his Chants de Maldoror. Lacroix takes the money and prints the book — but then refuses to distribute it. As Lautréamont himself would later explain in a letter, Lacroix “refused to have the book appear because it depicted life in such bitter colors that he was afraid of the public prosecutor.” But why did Maldoror strike such fear into the publisher? Because it was the first book — and that’s no exaggeration — written on the principle that anything and everything must be the object of sarcasm; not just the century’s huge and heavy ballast, an easy target for ridicule, but likewise the work of those who had raged against the ridiculous: Baudelaire, for example, who is irreverently defined as “the morbid lover of the Hottentot Venus,” though quite possibly he was Lautréamont’s favorite poet, and doubtless his most immediate model. There is no controlling the consequences of such a gesture: it’s as though every given — and the whole world is a given — were suddenly kicked off its pedestal to wander about in a dizzying verbal drift where it is submitted to every possible combination and outrage at the hands of an imperturbable juggler: the faceless author Lautréamont, who cancels himself out more completely and more dispassionately than the still somewhat theatrical Rimbaud. To die at twenty-four in a rented room on the rue du Faubourg Montmartre, “sans autres renseignements,” as we read in Lautréamont’s acte de décès is at once a more reckless and effective elimination of identity than to give up writing and become an arms dealer in Africa.

Precisely because the case is so anomalous, it would be wise to approach it through all the customary questions. As, for example: which authors were important to Lautréamont before he published his book? In this regard the young man is helpful, explaining that he spent a great deal of time with “the noxious scribblers: Sand, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Musset, Du Terrail, Féval, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Leconte and the Grève des Forgerons.” Such a list, however, should be enough in itself to warn us that we are being led into a trap: the inventors of Rocambole and of Madame Bovary are placed on the same level, likewise the popular novelist Féval and Balzac, Baudelaire and François Coppée. It’s as though the very idea of there being levels had been discarded. But there is more to be said about influences: in order to unleash Typhoon Maldoror, Lautréamont seems to have taken his cue from a simple observation: that Romantic Satanism had a weak point — it was squeamish. So it won’t be enough for the serial killer Maldoror just to rape “the maiden asleep in the plane tree’s shade.” First he has his bulldog come along with him; then he tells the animal to rip out the girl’s throat. But the bulldog “contents himself with just violating in his turn that delicate child’s virginity.” Annoyed that the creature won’t do exactly as he’s told, Maldoror takes out “an American pocket knife with ten or twelve blades” and starts rooting about in the maiden’s vagina to extract her organs from that “hideous hole.” Finally, when her body looks like a “gutted chicken,” “he lets the corpse go back to sleep in the plane tree’s shade.” The evil geniuses of the dark side of Romanticism had usually spared us the details. The writer piled on disturbing adjectives like “unnameable,” “monstrous,” “perverse,” “terrifying,” which hardly improved the writing, but at least served to have the monstrous act itself disappear in a soft-focus fade. Lautréamont, on the other hand, takes Satanism at its word. The result is that the reader finds himself seized, as J. Gracq put it, by “the most embarrassing of nervous giggles” until very soon he has no idea at all where he is. In a parody? A clinical manual? Or swept away by a dark poet only a shade more radical than his predecessors?

It’s time to take a look at the book’s form. The guiding principle behind the writing of Maldoror is as follows: take all the literary material that sounds modern — which for the most part at the time we’re speaking of meant the Romantic, Satanic, or gothic, depending on who was describing it — then exaggerate it, push it right to the limit, thus draining it of its power, all the while keeping a straight face and making sure to repress a sardonic smile. But Lautréamont went further: quite cold-bloodedly he juxtaposes, or sometimes amalgamates, this feverish and ambitious Satanist literature, which found its greatest exponents in Byron and Baudelaire, with that huge production of inanities and sentimental flourishes that appeared in genre novels for ladies and their maids. So first the horrors of the gothic are described right down to the tiniest detail, rendering them ridiculous, then mixed with the mièvreries of the positive and edifying novels of nineteenth-century “social realism,” the which are quite implacably reproduced. All conspires to have “tragedy explode in the midst of this frightful frivolity.” Everything is reduced to the same level, in the obsessive sound of the same voice, which reaches us “as though amplified by a faulty microphone.”

But Lautréamont employs another method too, albeit one that, oddly enough, even his most illustrious critics don’t mention, as though it were merely incidental. I’m referring now to his compulsive repetitions: erratic blocks of prose recur, perhaps after only a few lines or a few pages, repeated word for word. They might be single sentences, though of such a kind that one can’t help noticing them: “Still a shapeless mass gave dogged chase, following his footsteps in the dust”; or again, “There, in a copse surrounded by flowers, the hermaphrodite, drenched in his tears, has fallen fast asleep on the grass”; or again, “The children chase after her, hurling stones, as if she were a blackbird.” In other places the repetition comes with slight variations and is introduced by a sentence that strikes the main chord, as is the case with: “They saw me coming down the valley, while the skin of my breast was still and calm as the slab over a tomb.” Or finally, repetitions may multiply and overlap, as in the episode that tells of Falmer, the blond fourteen-year-old with the oval-shaped face whom Maldoror grabs by the hair and “spins around in the air so fast that his scalp was left in his hand while his body shot off with centrifugal force to smash into the trunk of an oak tree …”

It’s as if the innocuous anaphora, as taught in any textbook of rhetoric, had been blown up beyond all proportion and then set insanely adrift. There are at least two consequences: first, the reading experience is brought close to the essential nature of nightmare, something that lies not so much in the awfulness of the elements that make up a vision, but in the way they keep on and on coming back into the mind. And then the narrative is injected with senselessness, the same way a single word, if repeated often enough, becomes a mere phonic husk freed from any semantic bond.

The premise that lies behind such methods is that the whole world — and in particular every literary form of whatever level — is inevitably cloaked in a poisonous blanket of parody. Nothing is what it claims to be. Everything is already a quotation the moment it appears. This enigmatic and unsettling development, of which few at the time were aware, can be seen as a manifestation of the fact that the whole world, as Nietzsche would soon announce, was going back to being a fable again. Except that now the fable is a heedless whirlwind where the various simulacra are constantly changing places in an egalitarian dust cloud. “Where there are no gods, the phantoms reign,” Novalis had prophesied. Now one could go a step further and say: gods and phantoms will alternate on the scene with equal rights. There is no longer a theological power capable of taking charge and putting them in order. In which case, who will risk dealing with them, arranging them? Another power, one that hitherto has been forever denied its independence, forever obliged to serve society, but which now threatens to hoist anchor for good and set sail, sovereign and solitary, as the vessel that brings together all the simulacra and wanders about the ocean of the mind for the pure pleasure and play of the gesture: literature. Which in this mutation may also be called absolute literature.

That parody is the governing principle behind all Lautréamont’s work is not easily demonstrated. For strictly speaking with Lautréamont nothing can be demonstrated. With great discipline he left not a single sentence — not even in his letters — that we might with any confidence take seriously. In vain does one look for some sort of declaration of his poetics, unless that poetics resides precisely in the suspicion that every word he wrote is a spoof. It’s a suspicion that will become overwhelming when we turn to look at the second phase of his work: the slim collection entitled Poésies. And even more so if we hear how he spoke of the book before it appeared. In October 1869 Lautréamont wrote to Poulet-Malassis: “I have celebrated evil as did Mickiewicz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire, etc. Of course I exaggerated the pitch a bit to do something new along the lines of that sublime literature that celebrates desperation only so as to oppress the reader and have him desire the good as a remedy.” These lines themselves are sharp with the bracing air of mockery. But here we must reconstruct what they leave implicit: the Chants de Maldoror were at that time languishing in printed sheets stacked in the warehouse of a publisher tormented by the prospect of prosecution. At first, according to Lacroix, Lautréamont “refused to amend the violence of his text.” He still hadn’t paid Lacroix an outstanding balance of 800 francs for the print run, and refused to do so unless the book was distributed. The situation was deadlocked, something that was in the interests of neither author nor printer. It was thus that they turned to Poulet-Malassis, a bibliophile and publisher experienced in finding the right channels for unloading risky books. Eager to come to an agreement, Lautréamont writes to Poulet-Malassis, “Sell them, I won’t stop you: what do I have to do in return? Dictate your terms,” and at the same time, to suggest how he might launch the book, he resorts to the ludicrous idea of the writer who celebrates evil to “oppress the reader” and thus have him turn to the good. Oddly, the publisher accepts the suggestion. Only two days later, in the Bulletin trimestriel des publications défendues en France imprimées à l’étranger, a publication Poulet-Malassis used to announce his new titles, Lautréamont’s book is presented thus:

“There are no more Manichaeans,” Pangloss used to say. “There is me,” Martin would answer. The author of this book belongs to a species no less rare. Like Baudelaire, like Flaubert, he believes that the aesthetic expression of evil implies the keenest appetite for the good, the highest possible morality.

Poulet-Malassis was far more perceptive and worldly-wise than Lacroix, whom Baudelaire loathed. So the same mockery implicit in Lautréamont’s letter — was he thinking, when he spoke of having “exaggerated the pitch a bit” at least as far as the erotic was concerned (for that was the area Poulet-Malassis specialized in), of the description of “long, chaste, and dreadful” sex between Maldoror and an “enormous female shark,” a coupling that would one day delight Huysmans? — that same mockery is now echoed in the publicity for the book. It’s as if in writing to his new distributor Lautréamont had given him instructions on how to camouflage the book so that it could be introduced into the world. Yet, at the end of the same letter, we hear a different tone creeping in. Having begged Poulet-Malassis to send the book to the most important reviewers, Lautréamont adds: “They alone will pass judgment in first and last instance on the beginning of a publication that will see its end of course only later when I myself have seen mine. That’s why the moral at the end isn’t there yet. But there is immense pain on every page. Is that evil?” The final, piercing question is one of those rare flickers where Lautréamont seems to speak to us directly. without the mediation of the outrageous and mocking. But it’s worth noticing another detail: he refers to Maldoror as a sort of carmen perpetuum that will be over only when the author himself is dead. Before then we can’t know what “the moral at the end” will be. Implication: perhaps “the good” the text is supposed to prompt us toward is also a temporary conclusion, to be turned on its head at will. And this is another of those hints that light up Maldoror like a phantasmagoria teeming with snares and pitfalls.

Four months after the first letter to Poulet-Malassis, on February 21st, 1870, Lautréamont writes another. It seems there has been no progress: “Has Lacroix handed over the edition or done anything else with it? Or have you rejected it? He hasn’t told me anything. I haven’t seen him since.” But during those months Lautréamont’s lucubration had taken him a decisive step forward. As he immediately goes on to announce:

You should know that I have repudiated my past. These days I celebrate only hope; but in order to do that I must first of all attack the century’s doubt (melancholies, sadnesses, griefs, desperations, lugubrious whinnyings, sham nastinesses, infantile prides, laughable calamities, etc., etc.). In early March I will be giving Lacroix a book where I take the finest poems of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Byron, and Baudelaire, and correct them so that they celebrate hope; I show how they should have been written. At the same time I correct six of the worst passages of my accursed book.

This is how he presents the Poésies. In those four months, then, Lautréamont seems to have realized that in order to introduce his monstrous Maldoror into the world, it wouldn’t be enough to claim he was celebrating evil to turn people to the good, an argument dangerously similar to that of pornographers who claim they are operating in defense of chastity. So why not celebrate the good directly? Thus a new method of working takes shape, one that is even more offensive and pernicious than that used in creating Maldoror, one, you might even say, that raises monstrosity exponentially to the power of two: he will correct other people’s writings “in order that they celebrate hope.” The premise now is that every boundary between literary properties has been pulled down. Authors are stooges. Literature is a continuum of words to be interfered with as one pleases, by transforming every sign into its opposite, if that’s what we want. But having set out along the path of total mockery, Lautréamont can’t stop himself, even if he wants to. What has been squared may just as well be cubed. So, why restrict oneself to correcting authors celebrating evil by turning their work round toward the good? Why not correct the authors who represent the good? And who would they be? By definition, the authors you read in school.

Again, this higher level of exasperation, which now sweeps all before it, Good and Bad alike, is announced in a letter, a letter that was to be Lautréamont’s last. This time it is addressed to the family banker, Darasse, who was sending the young man a monthly pittance. Lautréamont writes to ask for an advance so as to be able to pay for the printing of a book that this time is impeccably virtuous. After a brief account of his troubles with Lacroix, he adds:

The whole thing was pointless. It has opened my eyes. I said to myself that, since the poetry of doubt (of the books of today no more than a hundred and fifty pages will survive) has reached a point of such dark desperation and theoretical iniquity, it follows that it is radically false; for this reason, they put principles in doubt, principles that must be placed beyond discussion: it is worse than wicked. The poetic groanings of this century are no more than hideous sophisms. To celebrate tedium, grief, sadness, melancholy, death, darkness, obscurity, etc., means to insist on looking only and willy-nilly at the infantile reverse of everything. Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, they have all voluntarily metamorphosed into milksops. They are the Great Soft Heads of our age. Always sniveling! That’s why I’ve completely changed my methods, so as to celebrate nothing but hope, TRANQUILITY, happiness, DUTY. That way I can re-establish my links with the Corneilles and Racines along that chain of good sense and sangfroid that was brusquely interrupted by those poseurs Voltaire and Rousseau.

It’s worth noting a few details. First, this letter wasn’t written to a publisher, like Poulet-Malassis, who had been a friend of Baudelaire’s, but to a banker, who tended to treat his client’s young son with a “deplorable and systematic diffidence” entirely in line with his job. What’s more, given its nature, the letter seemed destined to be lost along with countless others of the same variety. In fact, it owes its survival only to a chance encounter laden with Ducassian irony: in 1978 an electrician from Gavray, not far from the English Channel, found it in a pile of old papers on sale at a junk dealer’s in Porbail near Valognes.

Writing to Darasse, Lautréamont assumes the petitioning tone of him who, while asking for an advance of cash, is eager to reassure the family banker by coming across as a young fellow of good morals. Yet at the same time the banker becomes his guinea pig, because many of the expressions used in the letter can be found almost word for word in the Poésies. Thus Lautréamont achieves a sort of white heat of mockery — while once again displaying that peculiarity, a congenital defect almost, that Artaud would describe thus: “[Lautréamont] can’t write a simple, ordinary letter without our sensing an epileptic tremor of the Word so that, whatever is being discussed, it refuses to be used without a shudder.” But what will happen if that “epileptic tremor of the Word” is put at the service, as Lautréamont now claims, of that “famous idea of the good” cultivated by “teaching staffs and preservers of the just” who direct “generations young and old along the path of honesty and hard work”?

The result will be Poésies, a work that appeared in two installments distinguished by Roman numerals: as of today there are two remaining copies of Poésies I; only one, in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, of Poésies II. This too must be added to the long list of Lautréamont’s glorious firsts. Though in these books he went back to using his real name: Isidore Ducasse. Why hide, after all, when this work, as he claimed, can “be read by a fourteen-year-old girl”?

Poésies I offers a drastic declaration of intent that solemnly resumes and expands the ideas set out in the letter to the banker Darasse. All the same, one soon encounters a first, brutal breach of the rules of belles lettres: a paragraph a page and a half long made up of a single sentence where the main verb appears after forty-eight lines at the end of an enumeración caotica of the elements that constitute the literature he is condemning. To our eyes today the paragraph presents itself as a superb parody of all nineteenth-century literature. It opens with “the perturbances, the anxieties, the depravations”; the list then proceeds for twenty or so lines with “the damp-hen smells, the languors, the frogs, the cuttlefish, the sharks, the desert simoom, all that is somnambulistic, sinister, nocturnal, somniferous, night-wandering, sticky, seal-speaking, ambiguous, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anemic, one-eyed”—and so it goes on with a momentum all its own, until finally the author declares all the elements in his list “filthy flesh heaps I blush to mention.” This having mentioned exactly one hundred and one of them, blushing no doubt with every new entry. And on the subject of “flesh heaps,” the reader of Maldoror will at once connect them to the ghostly Mervyn when he speaks of the “place where my glacial immobility resides, surrounded by a long row of empty rooms, filthy flesh heaps of my hours of boredom.”

But Lautréamont doesn’t let us dwell on such things, and only a few lines after that extraordinarily long list he is already announcing a new literary canon: “The masterpieces of the French language are school prize-giving speeches and academic disquisitions.” And now it’s as if Lautréamont were already looking forward to an unprecedented pleasure: not, as in Maldoror, setting the lushness of monstrosity against an obtuse and upright order, but drawing instead on the monstrosity already present within the order itself, and this simply by using the technique most congenial to him — that of taking things literally and pushing them to their furthest extremes. All too soon he is soaring to the following conclusion: “Any literature that challenges the eternal truths is condemned to feed only on itself. It is wrong. It devours its own liver. The novissima verba raise a superb smile on the faces of the snotty brats at school. We have no right to question the Creator about anything.” Still savoring these peremptory and vacuous announcements, we may well be struck by the following thought: that what we are reading is itself one of the purest examples of a literature that feeds only on itself.

But let’s move on now to Poésies II: for here the perverse mechanism heralded in Poésies I is immediately set in action. The method now is plagiarism — or, to be precise, plagiarism with inversion and a reversal of terms. It works like this: you take passages from the great classics (the favorites are first Pascal, who dominates, then La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and La Bruyère, but there is still space for a couple of moderns like Hugo and Vigny), and you present as affirmation what was in fact negation, or, of course, vice versa. The inversion technique creates various effects. The most frequent is a tendency to neutralize, to render meaningless both the inverted passage and the shadow passage behind it, often something extremely well known. To this end, Lautréamont’s most effective device is his elimination of the empty space between one passage and the next, something that forces each aphoristic splinter or denser fragment to accept its position in a calm and impassive sequence of non sequiturs. On other occasions, however, inversion sparks off something quite different: a fierce flash that illuminates the malign torturer of texts more than the classical text tortured. Here is an example from a piece by Pascal on happiness, a piece that ends in an oddly edifying tone, deploring the man “who seeks for it in vain in external things and is forever dissatisfied since happiness is neither in us nor in creation, but in God alone.” Thus Pascal, but it could be any one of countless spiritual advisers passing a proverbial and very French buck to each other across the centuries. Until along comes Lautréamont and we have this: Man gets bored, he seeks this multitude of occupations. He has the idea of the happiness he has conquered: finding it in himself, he looks for it in external things. He is satisfied. Unhappiness is neither in us nor in the creatures. It is in Elohim.” In the last sentence, and quite unexpectedly, the mocking joke is elevated to the level of Gnostic pronouncement. But the process doesn’t end here. A little further on, taking as his shadow text a pompous passage from Vauvenargues, full of exclamation marks and rhetorical questions, Lautréamont drains it of bombast and restores it to sobriety while once again altering its meaning, this time toward a grim scenario of cosmic struggle: “We know what the sun and the heavens are. We possess the secrets of their movements. In the hand of Elohim, blind instrument, unfeeling mechanism, the world attracts our homage. The revolutions of empires, the aspects of the times, the nations, the conquerors of science, all of this springs from an atom that creeps up, lasts but a day, destroys the spectacle of the universe, in every age.” Lautréamont’s voice rings out unmistakable in that “destroys the spectacle of the universe”; the corresponding words in Vauvenargues read: “embraces somehow in a single glance the spectacle of the universe in every age.” But perhaps the final outrage comes a few lines later (and immediately before the end), where the shadow text now is a famous passage from La Bruyère that runs thus: “Everything has been said, and we come too late after seven thousand years of men thinking before us. As far as customs are concerned, the beautiful and the best have already been taken. We but glean a field already harvested by the ancients and the more able of the modern.” Watch out for the inversions in Lautréamont: “Nothing has been said. We come too soon after seven thousand years of men. As far as customs are concerned, and the rest too for that matter [I emphasize the words not there in La Bruyère], the worst has already been taken. We have the advantage of coming after the ancients, we able among the moderns.” La Bruyère’s words are the very exemplum of culture, of the slow transmission of knowledge, of that douceur that over time seeps into civilization, smoothes its rough edges, saps its harsh energy. Lautréamont’s words are the pronouncement of the artificial barbarian as he prepares to escape from aphasia, though it is still “too soon.” And the whole of the past is dismissed with contempt as no more than a servile chain of men transmitting a knowledge that regards “the worst part” of everything. But then, as Poésies II had already pronounced earlier on, inverting Vauvenargues: “One can be just, if one is not human.”

We reach the end of Poésies II infected at once by an insane hilarity and by a vast sense of unease. It’s a response we haven’t experienced in relation to any other piece of literature, but very like the sensation of aphasia Max Stirner evokes at the end of The Unique. One might say that Stirner and Lautréamont have in common something none of their contemporaries share: it is the lethal dagger-point of a personal autonomy that presents itself as a quietly autistic delirium. Thus Maldoror ponders: “If I exist, I am not another. I cannot accept this ambiguous plurality in myself. I want to be alone in my inner reasoning. Autonomy … or if not may I be turned into a hippopotamus.” Here the infinitesimal splinter of the individual subject opposes itself, exactly as in Stirner’s The Unique, to any and every other, but above all to that devastating Other in whom it is not hard to recognize the “Celestial Bandit,” the fatal Demiurge, always ready to creep in everywhere — and above all into the nooks and crannies of the individual’s mental life — with his “ferocious curiosity.” Because this is the point, Maldoror goes on: “My subjectivity and the Creator are too much for the one brain.” As Remy de Gourmont would one day so concisely remark: “[Lautréamont] sees no one else in the world but himself and God — and God bothers him.”

After Stirner, Lautréamont is the second artificial barbarian to burst onto the scene. Not this time a barbarian of the spirit, but of literature. Just as Stirner had shown the rash neo-Hegelians that they were a band of bigots, in awe of the state and humanity, so, painstakingly, patiently, clear-sightedly, Lautréamont shows the Romantic Satanists, a huge tribe that culminated in Baudelaire, that they had no more than nibbled the first fruits of gothic horror; they hadn’t gone into the details. Even the places that it is reasonable to suppose produced these poisonous clouds were similar: rented rooms in big cities, Berlin or Paris, upper floors, the sky deep behind the windows, shadows on the walls. In both men’s pasts there are hints of an overheated, fanciful, frenzied adolescence that “thrived on the violation of duty,” imprisoned between college walls that “breed in their thousands the scalding, unappeasable resentments that can brand a whole life with their fire.”

A suppressed and destructive fury, a magmatic form. Léon Bloy, the first reader equal to Lautréamont, sensed it at once: “It is liquid lava. Something wild, black, devouring.” Only of Lautréamont and Stirner do we have no portraits (of Stirner there is a profile with glasses, sketched by Engels on a tavern menu). Stirner treats the philosophy that came before him (the most audacious philosophy) the way Lautréamont treats the literature of the Romantic rebels: pushing it to the limit to destroy it. Both were inspired by a blasphemous craving to see what would happen if they poured scorn on absolutely all the rules. Next to nothing, of course, is the answer, in the sense that hardly anyone realized what they were up to. But the gesture remains. After them every philosophy and every literature would be shot through by a fatal flaw.