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Comte de Lautréamont | |
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 Possibly a photo representing Lautréamont | |
| Born | Isidore Lucien Ducasse (1846-04-04)4 April 1846 |
| Died | 24 November 1870(1870-11-24) (aged 24) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Poet |
Comte de Lautréamont (/loʊtreɪəˈmɒn/;[1]French:[lotʁeamɔ̃]) was thenom de plume ofIsidore Lucien Ducasse ([dykas]; 4 April 1846 – 24 November 1870), aFrench poet born inUruguay. His only works,Les Chants de Maldoror[2] andPoésies, had a major influence on modern arts and literature, particularly on theSurrealists and theSituationists. Ducasse died at the age of 24.
Ducasse was born inMontevideo,Uruguay, to François Ducasse, a Frenchconsular officer, and his wife Jacquette-Célestine Davezac. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November 1847 in theMontevideo Metropolitan Cathedral and that his mother died soon afterwards, possibly due to an epidemic. Jean-Jacques Lefrère suggests she may have committed suicide, although concludes there is no way to know for certain. In 1851, as a five-year-old, he experienced the end of the eight-yearSiege of Montevideo in theUruguayan Civil War. He was brought up speaking three languages: French, Spanish, and English.
In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the ImperialLycée inTarbes. In 1863 he enrolled in theLycée Louis-Barthou inPau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy. He excelled at arithmetic and drawing and showed extravagance in his thinking and style. Isidore was a reader ofEdgar Allan Poe and particularly favoredPercy Bysshe Shelley andByron, as well asAdam Mickiewicz,Milton,Robert Southey,Alfred de Musset, andBaudelaire (see the letter of 23 October 1869 cited extensively below). At school he was fascinated byRacine andCorneille, and by the scene of the blinding inSophocles'Oedipus Rex. According to his schoolmate Paul Lespès, he displayed obvious folly "by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images" in an essay.[citation needed] After graduation he lived in Tarbes, where he started a friendship with Georges Dazet, the son of his guardian, and decided to become a writer.
After a brief stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse settled in Paris at the end of 1867. He began studies in view of entering theÉcole Polytechnique, only to abandon them one year later. Continuous allowances from his father made it possible for Ducasse to dedicate himself completely to his writing. He lived in the "Intellectual Quarter", in a hotel in theRue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where he worked intensely on the firstcanto ofLes Chants de Maldoror. It is possible that he started this work before his passage to Montevideo, and also continued the work during his ocean journey.
Ducasse was a frequent visitor to nearby libraries, where he readRomantic literature, as well as scientific works and encyclopaedias. The publisher Léon Genonceaux described him as a "large, dark, young man, beardless, mercurial, neat and industrious", and reported that Ducasse wrote "only at night, sitting at his piano, declaiming wildly while striking the keys, and hammering out ever new verses to the sounds". However, this account has no corroborating evidence, and is considered unreliable.[3][4]
In late 1868, Ducasse published (anonymously and at his own expense) the first canto ofLes Chants de Maldoror (Chant premier, par ***), a booklet of thirty-two pages.
On 10 November 1868, Ducasse sent a letter to the writerVictor Hugo, in which he included two copies of the first canto, and asked for a recommendation for further publication. A new edition of the first canto appeared at the end of January 1869, in the anthologyParfums de l'Âme in Bordeaux. Here Ducasse used his pseudonym "Comte de Lautréamont" for the first time. His chosen name may have been based on[citation needed] the title character ofEugène Sue's popular 1837gothic novelLatréaumont [fr], a haughty and blasphemous antihero similar in some ways to Isidore's Maldoror. The pseudonym was possibly paraphrasingl'autre à Mont(evideo),[5][6] although it can also be interpreted asl'autre Amon (the otherAmon) or "l'autre Amont" (the other side of the river: 'En amont' = French for: 'Upstream') or, finally, fromThe Count of Monte Cristo, "L'autre Mond" (the other world's count).[citation needed] Lefrère considers another possibility: le Comte de Lautréamont = le compte de l'autre à Mont (the account of the other at Montevideo); this could be interpreted as a joke at his father's expense, who supported Ducasse with a generous allowance.
Thanks to his father's money and the banker Darasse's good offices, a total of six cantos were to be published during late 1869, byAlbert Lacroix in Brussels, who had also published Eugène Sue. The book was already printed when Lacroix refused to distribute it to the booksellers as he feared prosecution forblasphemy orobscenity. Ducasse considered that this was because "life in it is painted in too harsh colors" (letter to the banker Darasse from 12 March 1870).
Ducasse urgently askedAuguste Poulet-Malassis, who had publishedBaudelaire'sLes Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857, to send copies of his book to the critics. They alone could judge "the commencement of a publication which will see its end only later, and after I will have seen mine". He tried to explain his position, and even offered to change some "too strong" points for future editions:
I have written of evil as Mickiewicz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire and others have all done. Naturally I pulled the registers in a slightly exaggerated way, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy. Thus it is always, after all, the good which is the subject, only the method is more philosophical and less naive than that of the old school. (...) Is that evil? No, certainly not.
— letter from 23 October 1869.
Poulet-Malassis announced the forthcoming publication of the book the same month in his literary magazineQuarterly Review of Publications Banned in France and Printed Abroad. Otherwise, few people took heed of the book. Only theBulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire noticed it in May 1870, saying: "The book will probably find a place under the bibliographic curiosities".
During spring 1869, Ducasse frequently changed his address, from 32 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre to 15 Rue Vivienne, then back to Rue Faubourg Montmartre, where he lodged in a hotel at number 7. While still awaiting the distribution of his book, Ducasse worked on a new text, a follow-up to his "phenomenological description of evil", in which he wanted to sing of good. The two works would form a whole, a dichotomy of good and evil. The work, however, remained a fragment.
In April and June 1870, Ducasse published the first two installments of what was obviously meant to be the preface to the planned "chants of the good" in two small brochures,Poésies I and II; this time he published under his real name, discarding his pseudonym. He differentiated the two parts of his work with the termsphilosophy andpoetry, announcing that the beginning of a struggle against evil was the reversal of his other work:
I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, malice with good, complaints with duty, scepticism with faith, sophisms with cool equanimity and pride with modesty.
At the same time Ducasse took texts by famous authors and cleverly inverted, corrected and openly plagiarized forPoésies:
Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author's sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.
Among the works plagiarized wereBlaise Pascal'sPensées andLa Rochefoucauld'sMaximes, as well as the work ofJean de La Bruyère,Luc de Clapiers,Dante,Kant andLa Fontaine. It even included an improvement of his ownLes Chants de Maldoror. The brochures ofaphoristic prose did not have a price; each customer could decide which sum they wanted to pay for it.
On 19 July 1870,Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, and after his capture, Paris wasbesieged on 17 September, a situation with which Ducasse was already familiar from his early childhood in Montevideo. The living conditions worsened rapidly during the siege, and according to the owner of the hotel he lodged at, Ducasse became sick with a "bad fever".
Lautréamont died at the age of 24, on 24 November 1870, at 8 am in his hotel. On his death certificate, "no further information" was given. Since many were afraid of epidemics while Paris was besieged, Ducasse was buried the next day after a service inNotre-Dame-de-Lorette in a provisional grave at theCimetière du Nord. In January 1871, his body was put into another grave elsewhere.
In hisPoésies Lautréamont announced: "I will leave no memoirs", and as such, the life of the creator ofLes Chants de Maldoror remains for the most part unknown.
Les Chants de Maldoror is based on a character called Maldoror, a figure of unrelenting evil who has forsakenGod and mankind. The book combines a violent narrative with vivid and often surrealistic imagery.
The critic Alex De Jonge writes: "Lautréamont forces his readers to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and makes them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake".[7]
There is a wealth of Lautréamont criticism, interpretation and analysis inFrench (including an esteemed biography by Jean-Jacques Lefrère), but little in English.
Lautréamont's writing has many bizarre scenes, vivid imagery and drastic shifts in tone and style. There is much "black humor"; De Jonge argues that Maldoror reads like "a sustained sick joke".[8]
Poésies (Poems, Poetry) is Ducasse's other, minor surviving work, and is divided into two parts. UnlikeMaldoror,Poésies was published under Ducasse's given name.[9]
Both parts consist of a series ofmaxims oraphorisms in prose, which expressaesthetic opinions concerning literature and poetry. These statements frequently refer to authors of thewestern canon and compare their works and talents in rhetorical language; cited authors include theGreek tragedians,Edgar Allan Poe, and especially many French authors of Ducasse's period, includingCharles Baudelaire,Alexander Dumas, andVictor Hugo.Poésies is therefore not a collection ofpoetry as its title suggests, but instead a work ofliterary criticism, orpoetics.Poésies also contrasts with the negative themes ofMaldoror in the sense that it uses far more positive, uplifting, andhumanistic language. Goodness and conventional moral values are regularly praised, even as authors familiar to Ducasse are sometimes denigrated:
Do not deny the immortality of the soul, God's wisdom, the value of life, the order of the universe, physical beauty, the love of the family, marriage, social institutions. Ignore the following baneful pen-pushers: Sand, Balzac, Alexander Dumas, Musset, Du Terrail, Féval, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Leconte and theGrève des Forgerons!
— Poésies, Part I[10]
Despite this, there are commonalities withMaldoror. Both works regularly describe animals by way ofsimile or colorful analogy, and althoughGod is praised, other passages suggest on the contrary a humanism which places man above God: "Elohim is made in man's image."[11]
In 1917, French writerPhilippe Soupault discovered a copy ofLes Chants de Maldoror in the mathematics section of a small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had been admitted. In his memoirs Soupault wrote:
By the light of a candle that was permitted to me, I began reading. It was like an enlightenment. In the morning I read theChants again, convinced that I had dreamed... The day after,André Breton came to visit me. I gave him the book and asked him to read it. The following day he brought it back, enthusiastic as I had been.
Due to this find, Lautréamont was introduced to theSurrealists. Soon they called him their prophet. As one of thepoètes maudits (accursed poets), he was elevated to the Surrealist pantheon besideCharles Baudelaire andArthur Rimbaud, and acknowledged as a direct precursor to Surrealism. In the first edition of theManifeste du Surréalisme (1924) Breton wrote: "WithLes Chants de Maldoror the Surrealism was born. Older examples can only be traced all the way back to the time of prophets and oracles".[12]André Gide regarded him — even more than Rimbaud — as the most significant figure, as the "gate-master of tomorrow's literature", meriting Breton and Soupault "to have recognized and announced the literary and ultra-literary importance of the amazing Lautréamont".
Louis Aragon and Breton discovered the only copies of thePoésies in theNational Library of France, and published the text in April and May 1919 in two sequential editions of their magazineLiterature. In 1925, a special edition of the Surrealist magazineLe Disque Vert was dedicated to Lautréamont, under the title "Le cas Lautréamont" (The Lautréamont case). It was the 1927 publication by Soupault and Breton that assured him a permanent place inFrench literature and the status of patron saint in the Surrealist movement. In 1930, Aragon called Lautréamont the "veritable initiator of the modern marvelous",[13] with "the marvelous" being a primary feature of Breton's Surrealism.[14] In 1940, Breton incorporated him into hisAnthology of Black Humour.
The title of an object by American artistMan Ray, calledL'énigme d'Isidore Ducasse (The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse), created in 1920, contains a reference to a famous line in Canto VI, Chapter 3. Lautréamont describes a young boy as "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella".[15] Similarly, Breton often used this line as an example of Surrealist dislocation. In direct reference to Lautréamont's "chance meeting on a dissection table",Max Ernst defined the structure of the surrealist painting as "a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them". Referencing this line, the debut record by the experimental/industrial music groupNurse with Wound is titledChance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.
Maldoror inspired many artists:Fray De Geetere,Salvador Dalí,Man Ray,Jacques Houplain,Jindřich Štyrský,René Magritte,Georg Baselitz andVictor Man. Individual works have been produced byMax Ernst,Victor Brauner,Óscar Domínguez,André Masson,Joan Miró,Aimé Césaire,Roberto Matta,Wolfgang Paalen,Kurt Seligmann andYves Tanguy. The artistAmedeo Modigliani always carried a copy of the book with him and used to walk aroundMontparnasse quoting from it.
Félix Vallotton and Dalí made "imaginary" portraits of Lautréamont, since no photograph was available.
Kadour Naimi realized an adaptation ofLes Chants de Maldoror, in theater in 1984, and as a film in 1997.
A portion ofMaldoror is recited toward the end ofJean-Luc Godard's 1967 filmWeek End.
Situationist founder, filmmaker and authorGuy Debord developed a section fromPoésies II as thesis 207 inThe Society of the Spectacle. The thesis covers plagiarism as a necessity and how it is implied by progress. It explains that plagiarism embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. His fellow SituationistRaoul Vaneigem placed considerable importance on the insights of Lautréamont, stating in the Introduction toThe Revolution of Everyday Life that: "For as long as there have been men — and men who read Lautréamont — everything has been said and few people have gained anything from it."
The writersJean Paulhan andHenri Michaux have both counted Lautréamont as an influence on their work.[citation needed]
Kenneth Anger claimed to have tried to make a film based onMaldoror, under the same title, but could not raise enough money to complete it.[16]
In recent years, invoking an obscure clause in theFrench civil code, Article 171, modernperformance artist Shishaldin petitioned the government for permission to marry the author posthumously.[17]
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John Ashbery, an American poet influenced by surrealism, entitled his 1992 collectionHotel Lautréamont, and the English edition notes that Lautréamont is "one of the forgotten presences alive" in the book.
Brazilian authorJoca Reiners Terron depicts the character of Isidoro Ducasse as one of the seven angels of theApocalypse in his first novel,Não Há Nada Lá. Ducasse's character becomes obsessed with an edition ofLes Fleurs du mal in the novel, while taking a trip by train through Europe. Both Ducasse and hisChants de Maldoror are also briefly mentioned inJô Soares' 1995 novelO Xangô de Baker Street, and musicianRogério Skylab has a song inspired by, and named after, theChants of Maldoror in his 2021 albumCaos e Cosmos, Vol. 1.
Isidore Ducasse is the given name of the fashion creator in William Klein's 1966 movieWho Are You, Polly Maggoo?.
Lautréamont, as an unnamed "South American", appears as a character inJulio Cortázar's short story "The Other Heaven", which also uses quotations fromMaldoror as epigraphs.[18]
French philosopherGilles Deleuze and psychiatristFélix Guattari cited Lautréamont twice over the course of their joint two-volume work,Capitalism and Schizophrenia, once ineachvolume.[a][b]
Róbert Wittinger composed aMaldoror Requiem, for 8 soloists, mixed choir, narrator and large orchestra, Op.42 (1984-86).
There is a wealth of Lautréamont criticism, interpretation and analysis in French, including an esteemed biography by Jean-Jacques Lefrère, but little in English.
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