Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

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.