Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

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.

The principal argument leveled against the Greek myths was always of a moral, and above all a sexual, nature: the myths, it appeared, were to be condemned because full of unseemly stories, the chief offenders being the gods themselves. The objection was not, as some might suppose, invented by the Church Fathers; all they did, duty bound as they were, was to pad it out. We can find it in Xenophanes or, in exemplary form, in Plato. After which every age would color it as they chose, from the Alexandrians through to the Rococo. Indeed, the long chain of condemnation had still to be broken when, in 1879, Stéphane Mallarmé set out to translate and adapt a handbook of mythology: the Reverend George W. Cox’s Manual of Mythology . Mallarmé had taken on the job — the book was to be used in secondary schools — partly because he needed the money, but partly too out of the same privately esoteric propensities that a few years before had prompted him to produce and edit every word of a frivolous magazine called La Dernière Mode , a publication that could still, he claimed, when pulled out and dusted off, make him “dream for hours.” In adapting Cox’s text to the “French spirit,” Mallarmé made cuts and additions, paraphrasing here and reformulating there. The criteria he applied are revealing, so much so that when we come across a difference between the two texts, we immediately find ourselves wondering how and why Mallarmé made his changes. Until at a certain point the eye falls on a quite remarkable statement: “Si les dieux ne font rien d’inconvenant, c’est alors qu’ils ne sont plus dieux du tout”—“If the gods do nothing unseemly, then they are no longer gods at all.”

Twenty-five centuries of morality — pagan, Christian, and secular — seem to fall away before these words. Can it be, then, that in order to be a god one must be involved in unseemly behavior? Can it be that that vast repertoire of unnameable acts we come across in the ancient fables is itself the code through which the gods make themselves manifest? Such a theological vision would demand long and considered reflection. And in the end it might actually turn out to be more farsighted than the usual disapproval, at least if we think of it as the unsettling prelude to some kind of mystery. Having recovered from the shock, we turn at once to check Cox’s text, where we discover that the Reverend was himself translating, correctly this time, from Euripides: “If the gods do aught unseemly, then they are not gods at all.” Which is the opposite of what Mallarmé wrote. Yet his translation of the surrounding context respects Cox’s work in every detail, a state of affairs that prompted Bertrand Marchai to offer the following hypothesis: “It is nevertheless possible that Mallarmé did in fact write ‘Si les dieux font rien d’inconvenant,’ and that an overzealous typesetter added the regrettable ne , which the poet then failed to pick up.” Theological catastrophe thus comes, in this version of events, as the consequence of the fussiness of the setter and a mental lapse on the part of the poet. After long years of persecution, the revenge of the pagan gods, we are invited to suppose, reaches its acme in a misprint, something all the more significant in that it occurs on a page written by the very man who said he wanted to eliminate chance from writing. If this were the case, we should have to confess that no one before then had dared even conceive of the idea that chance, on this occasion, helped to formulate.

But the whole thing will take on a different light if we recall Lautréamont’s Poésies: for Mallarmé’s scandalous statement looks very like something Lautréamont might have come up with using his sarcastic process of plagiarism plus inversion. At which point it’s as if the uncertainty, indeed vertigo, that Poésies inspires had spread, stretching out silky octopus tentacles as far as Mallarmé; as if this huge joke at literature’s expense were now mingling its lymph with the work of a man who attempted the supreme vindication of literature.

That sentence about the gods reminds us of another curiosity in Mallarmé’s adaptation of Cox, one that cannot this time be attributed to the mischievous vagaries of chance. Almost every time Cox writes “God,” Mallarmé translates the word as “divinity.” And the moment of “maximum deviation” comes in the paragraph immediately after the scandalous statement above, as follows:

COX: “Zeus was a mere name by which they might speak of Him in whom we live and move, and have our being.”