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Comte de Lautréamont - pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870) | |
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Uruguayan-born French writer, called the grandfather of surrealist poetry. Isidore Ducasse died at the age of twenty-four in Paris. His fame rests on his notorious masterpiece, Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), a series of dreamlike and bizarre prose fragments, which he published under the pseudonym of Comte de Lautréamont. "Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu'il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison; car, à moins qu'il n'apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d'esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l'eau le sucre." (from Les Chants de Maldoror) Comte de Lautréamont was born Isidore-Lucien Ducasse in Montevideo, Uruguay. His father, François Ducasse, worked Deputy Secretary at the French Consulate. Jacquette-Celestine Davezac, Isidore's mother, was seven months pregnant on her wedding day. She died in December 1847. Little is known of Ducasse's early childhood. At the age of thirteen, he was sent to France to acquire French education and training in engineering. Ducasse entered in 1859 the Imperial Lycée at Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrenées, probably spending his school holidays with his relatives in Bazet, his father's birthplace. Three years later he left the school, and in 1863 he entered the Lycée at Pau (now the Lycée Louis-Barthou). At school Ducasse distinguished himself in arithmetic and drawing, but he was also noted for his extravagances of thought and style. One of his schoolfellows recalls that Ducasse's "own brand of madness revealed itself definitively in a French essay in which with a dreadful profusion of adjectives he'd seized the opportunity of accumulating the most horrible images of death." Gustave Hinstin, Ducasse's teacher, put him on detention for this essay. "Ducasse was deeply hurt by Hinstin's reproaches and this punishment." (from Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont, trans. by Alexis Lykiard, 1970) After spending some years probably at Tardes, Ducasse visited Montevideo. According to Albert Lacroix, Ducasse's first publisher, he settled in Paris in 1867 intending to study at the Polytechnic or the College of Mining. He lived first in a hotel on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Financially he was still supported by his father. With the help of his generous allowance, Ducasse was able shut himself off from bourgeois society and devote himself entirely to writing. "He wrote only at night, seated at his piano," said Léon Genonceaux, who published Les Chants de Maldoror in 1890. "He used to declaim, would coin his phrases hammering out his tirades with the chords." Ducasse's career lasted only two years. During this period he invented himself as an author and created his own aesthetic universe, by becoming in the beginning a published writer and self-confident breaker of taboos, and then a literary theorist and philosopher. The first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror was published anonymously in Paris in 1868. It contained several references to Georges Dazet, Ducasse's friend at the lycée in Tarbet in 1861-62. In the second version of the canto, reprinted at Bordeaux in Evariste Carrance's anthology, Parfums de l'Ame (1869), his friend is simply "D..." When the complete work was printed in 1869, Ducasse used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, borrowed from the hero of Eugène Sue's Latréaumont (1837), set in the days of Louis XIV. In this final version the "D..." had completely disappeared, and was replaced by different creatures from octopus to vampire bat. From the very first lines Maldoror makes it clear that it was not written for the readers of Sue's popular novels: "May it please that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, finds without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages." Maldoror, the title character and a alter ego of the narrator, is a Luciferian rebel, a shapeshifter, who has chosen evil over good, but who at the same time suffers from cruelty and occasionally feels pity. In canto III Maldoror rapes a young girl, sets his bulldog on her, and then cuts open her vagina with a penknife. "From this enlarged trough he removed the internal organs, one after the other: the intestines, lungs, liver, and finally the heart itself were ripped from their roots and pulled out through the frightful aperture into the light of day." Fearing prosecution, Ducasse's Belgian publisher refused to distribute the work to booksellers. Maldoror went nearly unnoticed by the public. Ducasse himself said in a letter, that "the whole thing went down the drain." Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had published Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, mentioned the author in his Bulletin trimestriel des Publications défendues en France, imprimées à l'Estranger (October 1869): "The author of this book is of no less rare a breed. Like Baudelaire, like Flaubert, he believes that the aesthetic expression of evil implies the most vital appreciation of good, the highest morality." And in the Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire the reviewer wrote that the book "will find a place among the bibliographical curiosities" (May 1870). "To study evil so as to bring out the good is not to study good in itself. Given a suitable phenomenon, I shall seek its cause." (from Poésies, 1870) In 1869 Ducasse moved to 32 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and next year to 15 Rue Vivienne, and then to a hotel on Faubourg-Montmartre. Between April and June 1870, he published two booklets of aphoristic prose pieces, Poésies, both printed by Balitout, Questroy et Cie. With Poésis Ducasse wanted to produce a counterpoint to the provocative and romantic theme of evil in Maldoror. "To sing of boredom, suffering, miseries, melancholies, death, darkness, the somber, etc., is wanting at all costs to look only at the puerile reverse of things," Ducasse wrote in a letter. "This is why I have completely changed methods, to sing exclusively only of hope, expectation, CALM, happiness, DUTY." Ducasse died during the siege of Paris, on November 24, 1870. "I will leave no memoirs," Ducasse stated in Poésies. His body was buried in a temporary grave in the Cemetière du Nord. In 1871 his remnants were moved to another place in the cemetery. Maldoror was republished in 1890 but it received little notice until André Breton rescued his work from obscurity. Ducasse's often quoted simile, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!", become a definition of Surrealistic thought. Ducasse's work has also inspired a number of artists, including Salvador Dali's etchings from 1934 and Man Ray's 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse' (1920). Jeremy Reed's fictionalized biography, Isidore (1992), was based on the author's life. After Maldoror was canonized as a work of genius, its shocking scenes have been regarded as the essential part of its construction and philosophy, like in the works of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, in Lautréamont Nomad (1994) Mark Polizzotti argued, "the average child, is capable of imagining worse" - which leaves open the question of whether it is an issue with regard to an average child. However, Maurice Blanchot has emphasized that Maldodor's sadism is far from Sade. "In Lautréamont, there is a natural rebellion against injustice, a natural tendency toward goodness, a powerful elation that is, from the start, characterized by neither perversion nor evil." (Lautréamont and Sade, 2004) Ducasse mentions in a letter as his sources of inspiration the poetry of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Byron and Baudelaire. Les Chants de Maldoror was comprised of six cantos, in which the pseudo-aristocratic voice of the narrator expresses his deadpan disdain for the the mankind. "My poetry shall consists of attacks, by all means, upon that wild beast, man, and the Creator, who should never have begotten such vermin!" Full of contradiction, Maldoror mixes moralizing with macabre humor, warns of its corruptive power on its readers, but ends in catharsis, pretends to praise death, darkness, and cultural destruction, but basically re-established what it condemns. Many critics have discussed the autobiographical references given in the text and its homosexual elements. In canto IV Maldoror confesses, "I have always taken infamous fancy to the pale youngsters in schools and the sickly mill-children." However, the sparse self-references in Maldoror add little to what we know of the life of the author. For further reading: Lautréamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot (2004); Poetics of the Pretext: Reading Lautréamont by Roland-Francois Lack (1998); Isidore Ducasse: Auteur des Chants de Maldoror, par le comte de Lautréamont by Jean-Jacques Lefrère (1998); Lautréamont Nomad by Mark Polizzotti (1994); 'Introduction' by Alexis Lykiard, in Maldoror & The Complete works of the Comte de Lautréamont (1994); Lautréamont et Sade by Maurice Blanchot (1949); Images de Lautréamont by Frans De Haes (1970); Lautréamont à Montevideo by Alvaro Guillot-Muñoz (1972); Nightmare Culture by Alex De Jonge (1973); Lautréamont by Wallace Fowlie (1973); Lautréamont du lieu commun à la parodie by Claude Bouché (1974); Lautréamont's Imagery, A Stylistic Approach by Peter W. Nesselroth (1969) Selected works:
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