Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

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.”