The songs of Maldoror

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Anonymous first edition of the 1st chant of the "Chants of Maldoror" (Paris 1868)

The songs of Maldoror ( Les Chants de Maldoror ) are the only work by the French poet Lautréamont (pseudonym for Isidore Lucien Ducasse) who exerted a great influence on modern literature, and especially on Surrealism . It appeared in 1874 and is considered one of the most radical works in Western literature.

André Breton described the work in 1940 as the “Apocalypse”: “No matter how bold you will think and undertake in the coming centuries, it has been formulated here in his magical law in advance.” And André Gide saw Ducasse as the “lock master the literature of tomorrow ”.

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Maldoror, hero and first-person figure, is the ultimate incarnation of evil . He is "a black, shattered archangel of unspeakable beauty", as Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, a "sun of evil" ( Aurore du Mal = Maldoror) and finds himself on our planet, stranded among the humanity he hated, which he his wants to show one's own wickedness.

“At his name the heavenly hosts tremble ; and more than one says that Satan himself, Satan the incarnation of evil, is not so terrible. "(Canto 6, verse 8)

In various masks and metamorphoses, Maldoror wages a battle against the human creature and God , his archenemy. Its declared aim is to surpass God and men in their wickedness. His means for this are: fears, confusion, degradation, grimaces, rule of the exceptional and the strange, darkness, burrowing imagination, the dark and gloomy, tearing into extreme opposites, inclination to nothing, infernal cruelty. He has made the vow to overcome the Creator, to do evil to destroy evil, to commit crimes to end crime.

“My poetry will consist of a single attack, waged by all means against man, this raging beast, as well as against the Creator, who should never have created such a vermin. Volume upon volume will pile up until the end of my life, and yet one will only ever find this single thought that is permanently present in my consciousness. ”(2nd song, 4th stanza)

Maldoror's Luciferian shadow sweeps through the day, it encounters death and horror, in which the living is dead, the inorganic comes to life. At night he is haunted by phantoms and the memory of unspeakable atrocities. As a satanic seducer, he also wants to tempt others to do evil, often only to torment his victims (often children).

"I use my spirit to depict the delights of cruelty, not fleeting, artificial delights, but those that began with man, that will end with him." (1st song, 4th stanza)
Frontispiece of the 1890 new edition in the Édition Léon Genonceaux

In the first song , Maldoror “made a pact with prostitution in order to sow discord in families” and is nicknamed “ vampire ”, for whom nothing is as good as the blood of a child “if you drink it warm”. His viciousness is reflected in meticulously described torture scenes:

“Let your nails grow for a fortnight. O! Is it sweet to brutally tear a child out of bed who is not yet growing on his upper lip and, with his eyes wide open, to pretend to gently run his hand over his forehead to brush back his beautiful hair! Then suddenly, at the moment when it least expected it, to dig its long nails into its soft chest, but in such a way that it does not die; for if it died, one could not see it suffer later. "(1st chant, 6th stanza)

But Maldoror is not only a sadist and erotomaniac ("My genitals are forever offering the gloomy spectacle of swelling"), he sometimes also has masochistic traits: After the enjoyable and extensive mangling of a young man, he has the desire to have the same in death, in infinity to get done to the boy. And he is also familiar with self-torment, self-tearing.

“I wanted to laugh like the others; but this was impossible. I took a penknife with a sharp blade and slit open the flesh where the lips unite ... "(1st song, 5th stanza)

Maldoror's basic understanding that life means suffering and pain ("remember well, we are on this dismasted ship to suffer") results from the knowledge that man is bad. He repeatedly complains of his selfishness and coldness as well as the cruelty of God who created him:

“What is the injustice in the highest resolutions? Is he out of his mind, the creator? "(1st chant, 13th stanza)

In the second song , Maldoror is looking for a friend, a kindred soul. He finds it in a shark he watches devouring castaways:

“I was looking for a soul that was like me and I couldn't find it. I searched the most hidden corners of the earth; my perseverance was in vain. But I couldn't stay alone. I needed someone who would affirm my character; I needed someone who thought like me. (…) For a few minutes they looked straight at each other; and both were amazed to find so much cruel pleasure in each other's eyes. They swim in circles, do not take their eyes off each other and everyone says to themselves: 'I have been mistaken until now; there is one who is more evil than me. ' Then they slipped between two waves, in unison and in mutual admiration, the shark, dividing the water with her fins, and Maldoror, beating the tide with his arms; and they held their breath in deep reverence, each filled with the desire to contemplate his living image for the first time. "(2nd song, 13th stanza)

Maldoror's desperate struggle against God and man, those “sublime apes”, paints a cruel picture of the world and human nature, a nightmarish world of horror. Lautréamont forbids his hero to commit suicide as redemption:

“I received life like a wound, and I forbade suicide to heal the scar. I want the Creator to contemplate the gaping rift at every hour of his eternity. That is the atonement that I inflict on him. "(3rd song, 1st stanza)

In the third song , Maldoror shows us a woman whom he has driven insane by raping her little daughter and setting his bulldog on her, in order to then eviscerate the body with a penknife:

“He pulls out an American pocket knife with ten to twelve blades that serve various purposes. He opens the sharp-edged legs of this steel hydra; and, seeing that the lawn has not yet disappeared under the color of the blood that had been shed so profusely, set about exploring the vagina of the unfortunate child with this scalpel without turning pale. From this enlarged hole he pulls out the internal organs one after another: the intestines, the lungs, the liver and finally the heart itself are torn from their seat and dragged through the terrible opening into the daylight. The victim notices that the little girl, a gutted chicken, has long been dead; he interrupts the constant growth of his frenzy and lets the corpse sleep on in the shade of the plane tree. "(3rd song, 2nd stanza)

Lautréamont's hatred grows to blasphemy ; so he lets God justify himself before a hair that he has lost in a disreputable house. Maldoror comes to a brothel and finds a talking hair there that calls out to the master in a desperate monologue and asks the reasons why his master came here and dirty himself with a prostitute. When the Lord returns to take back the lost hair, it is God, full of shame for the deed and laden with the reproaches of Satan. Remorseful, he judges himself and recognizes man's right to revolt against his Creator. Maldoror describes the Creator lying on the street and "hideously drunk":

“Drunk as a bug that swallowed three tons of blood during the night! (...) The person who passed by stopped in front of the misunderstood Creator, and to the applause of the felt louse and the otter he stained the raised face with feces for three days! "(3rd song, 4th stanza)

In the fourth chant , a man is hung by his hair for three days because he refused to have sex with his mother. He is tarred and flogged by her and his wife (“the two most hideous specimens of the human race”). The disgust for life has grown to such an extent that the narrator can only get rid of his despair by evoking ugliness, decay and indignation in the densest symbolic images of the repulsive. Maldoror sees himself in the 4th song:

“I am dirty. The lice are eating me. The swine vomit when they see me. The scabs and scabs of leprosy have covered my skin with scales and yellowish pus. I don't know the water of the rivers, the dew of the clouds. A huge mushroom with cone-bearing stalks grows on my neck like a manure heap. I am sitting on a misshapen piece of furniture and have not moved my limbs for four centuries. ”(4th song, 4th stanza)

The first five chants also contain passages that are completely independent of the history of Maldoror, Lautréamont sings about the "incomprehensible pederasts " (V, 5), criticizes literary criticism and glorifies the ocean in a flowing hymn :

“Old Ocean, oh great bachelor, when you hurry through the solemn solitude of your phlegmatic realms, you are proud of your birth glory and of the true praise I eagerly give you. (...) I greet you, old ocean! "(I, 9)

Elsewhere Lautréamont boasts in an Ode to Mathematics :

“O strict mathematics, I have not forgotten you since your learned lessons, sweeter than honey, entered my heart like a refreshing wave. (...) arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! grandiose trinity! shining triangle! Anyone who did not know you is a fool! "(II, 10)
The column on Place Vendôme in Paris
The Pantheon in Paris, 1890

The sixth and last song is referred to as a “little novel” in the text and tells the complete story of the young man Mervyn, for whose beauty Lautréamont uses the famous metaphor “as beautiful as the accidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table” (“beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie! "). Maldoror pursues Mervyn through Paris to “steal the booty from God”. God sends an archangel in the shape of a crab "to save the young man from certain death" and to bring Maldoror to account, but Maldoror slain and Mervyn falls to Maldoror:

“He unfolded the sack he was carrying, opened it, and, taking hold of the young man's head, put his whole body in the cloth cover. With his handkerchief he knots the end that served as the entrance. As Mervyn let out high-pitched screams, he lifted the sack like a bundle of laundry and hit it several times against the bridge railing. Then the delinquent, who had noticed his bones crack, kept his mouth shut. Unique scene that no novelist will come back to! "

Mervyn is thrown by Maldoror from the column of Place Vendôme across the Seine onto the dome of the Panthéon , where you can marvel at him as a "dried out, stuck skeleton":

“Mervyn, followed by the rope, is like a comet dragging its flaming tail behind it. The iron ring of the noose, which flashes in the sun, encourages you to complete the illusion yourself. In the course of the trajectory, the condemned man splits the air up to the left bank of the Seine, flies over it thanks to what I suspect is unlimited propulsive power, and his body collides with the dome of the Pantheon, while the rope partly with its windings the upper wall of the huge one Dome wraps around. (...) Check it out for yourself if you don't want to believe me. "

Shape and style

Lautréamont created a world of images in the “Gesänge des Maldoror” that broke all literary conventions of the 19th century. The work is also unique in form. Based on black romanticism and the visionary imagery of symbolism , Lautréamont combined irony with absurd comedy, used stylistic devices such as ancient Greek palinody (abuse) and even used scenic dialogues. In the first song, the eleventh and twelfth stanzas form, so to speak, two small plays, as a conversation between a family and a dialogue with a gravedigger.

The language is extremely pictorial, associative and intoxicating and sometimes, anticipating the écriture automatique of surrealism , glides over into the hallucinatory - grotesque . Lautréamont automatically wrote at least parts of the “Chants de Maldoror” under the impression of a lecture on the “Problem of Evil” by the philosopher Ernest Naville (see below) .

The six chants are divided into 60 stanzas of different lengths (I / 14, II / 16, III / 5, IV / 8, V / 7, VI / 10), were originally not numbered and only separated by slashes. The last eight stanzas of the last song, which is self-contained as a little novel, were provided with Roman numerals. Each chant ends with a line indicating its end.

At the beginning and at the end of the individual chants, the text often refers to the work itself, Lautréamont speaks with reference to the actual author Isidore Ducasse, whom he also identifies as a “Montevidean”. As a result, the author and the first person often flow into one another, the chants form a puzzle that repeatedly misleads the reader's expectations.

Lautréamont

To let you feel the reader that he is traveling to a "dangerous philosophical hike," says Lautréamont uses the identification of the reader in the text to the reader of the text, a process which already Baudelaire in reading instruction for Les Fleurs du Mal has used . Ducasse also comments on the work and gives instructions on how to read it. The first sentence already contains a "warning" to the reader:

"Heaven grant that the reader, bold and instantly seized with cruel lust like what he reads, can find his abrupt and wild way through the desolate swamps of these dark and poison-filled pages without losing direction; for unless he approaches this reading with inexorable logic and a mental tension that at least outweighs his suspicions, the deadly emanations of this book will soak his soul like water does sugar. "

The bringing together of the contradicting, the incompatible, the gruesome and the banal, but also the technical and the scientific in Lautréamont's poetry reflects the effort to banish the opaque, the disintegrated with the means of language. Baudelaire called this structural compulsion in modern poetry “decomposing and deforming”. It is a reproduction of the chaotic, a “sawing up” of the world, as Lautréamont called it in his “Poésies”.

The predominant stylistic device is metaphor . The passage in which Lautréamont describes the beauty of the young man Mervyn has become famous:

“It is as beautiful as the retractability of the catches of birds of prey; or the uncertainty of the muscular movements in the wounds of the soft tissues in the region of the back of the neck; or even more like this permanently effective rat trap, which is always re-tensioned by the captured animal, that is, it can automatically take in infinite rodents and even functions hidden under straw; and above all like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table! "(6th song, 3rd stanza)

The occurrence of the most diverse animal species is remarkable, the violence and cruelty of which fill entire stanzas ( Gaston Bachelard counted 185 altogether): the louse that lives only for the work of annihilation (II, 9), the scarab, which shows the remains of the loved one who has been killed pushes himself (V, 2), a wild pig that kills to its heart's content (IV, 6), the dolphin man (IV, 7) or the man-eating god (II, 8).

A characteristic motif Maldorors is the unmotivated murder ( meurtre gratuit ) about the third song in which a pain become mother crazy the murder of her young daughter complained that Maldoror from hatred of creation and human unmotivated killed - a motif that later found with André Gide , Jean-Paul Sartre , André Malraux , Jean Genet and Albert Camus .

Because of their infernal cruelty , Die Gesänge des Maldoror has often been compared with the work of the Marquis de Sade , a comparison that Maurice Blanchot countered in his 1949 essay Lautréamont et Sade : “With Lautréamont one finds a natural rebellion against injustice from the start , a strong longing for virtue and a powerful pride that is neither guided by perversion nor by evil. "

Lautréamont's chants have also been associated with Georges Bataille and later A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Bret Easton Ellis ' American Psycho .

Lautréamont saw the best success of his "Gesänge" with those readers who would be able to absorb the magic of poetry in an unprejudiced, free, somnambulistic state: hypnosis as overcoming all barriers, as the elimination of all obstacles to thinking and to achieve that conjuring effect, of which Verlaine speaks as "the music of verse".

Emergence

In 1851, at the age of five , Isidore Ducasse experienced the end of the eight-year siege of Montevideo in the Argentine-Uruguayan War ( Guerra Grande ), the cruel details of which he undoubtedly got to know. During his school days in France he read Edgar Allan Poe , devoured Shelley and especially Byron , but also Mickiewicz , Milton , Southey , Musset , Baudelaire . In class he was fascinated by Racine and Corneille , but above all by the scene of the dazzling in Sophocles ' King Oedipus .

Lautréamont (1846–1870) - “imaginary” portrait by Felix Vallotton

After a short stay with his father in Montevideo , Ducasse settled in Paris at the end of 1867 and studied at the École polytechnique , but gave up this project a year later. He lived in the 2nd arrondissement , in the district of the intellectuals and large boulevards , in a hotel at 23 rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and worked intensively on the first song of his prose poem , which he probably started before and during the crossing had continued his ocean voyage. The donations from his father allowed him to devote himself exclusively to writing.

The publisher Léon Genonceaux reported that Ducasse wrote “only at night at his piano”, “where he declaimed loudly, pounded the keys wildly and hammered out new verses to the sounds”. He was inspired by the poems of the Black Romantic period , but also by scientific works and encyclopedias , which he borrowed from nearby libraries and some of which he quoted verbatim.

In the autumn of 1868 Ducasse published the first song ( Les Chants de Maldoror, Chant premier, par *** ) anonymously and at his own expense at Questroy et Cie in Paris. This first song also appeared in the anthology Parfums de l'Ame , published by Evariste Carrance in Bordeaux at the end of January of the following year . Isidore Ducasse used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont for the first time for this edition . The complete edition of all six cantos was finally to appear in late summer 1869 by Albert Lacroix in Brussels, who was also the publisher Eugène Sues . The chants of Maldoror were already in full print when Lacroix suddenly refused to deliver them to the booksellers for fear of censorship. Ducasse saw the reason in the fact “that life is painted in too harsh colors” (letter of March 12, 1870 to the banker Darasse)

In order to make the publication possible, Ducasse asked the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis , who had published Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil in 1857 , to send copies of reviews to the literary critics, since they alone “judge the beginning of a publication that will certainly end later will see when I've seen mine ”. He tried to explain his position and even offered to delete some "too strong passages" for future editions:

“I sang about evil as Mickiewickz , Byron , Milton , Southey , A. de Musset , Baudelaire and others did. Of course, I pulled the stops a little exaggerated in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that only sings about desperation in order to depress the reader and thereby make him wish the good as a cure. As a result, it is always the good that is sung about, only the method is more philosophical and less naive than that of the old school. (...) Is this evil? No, certainly not. "(Letter of October 23, 1869)

In the same month Poulet-Malassis mentioned the book in a literary magazine and in May 1870 in the Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire it was stated succinctly that the book would "probably find a place among the bibliographical curiosities", otherwise hardly anyone took any notice of it . While Ducasse was still longingly waiting for the delivery of his “songs”, he was working on a new text, an addition to his phenomenology of evil , in which he wanted to sing about the good. The two works were supposed to form a whole, a dialectic of good and bad. However, the work remained a fragment.

Influences

There have been repeated attempts to draw conclusions about the author's life from the chants of Maldoror . Concrete experiences such as crossing the ocean four times, which at that time lasted a month and which was reflected in the hymn to the ocean , the occasional appearance of Parisian street names or contemporary murderers, cannot be more than fragments in the exploration of a first “slow exhumed “biography.

View over Montevideo to the Cerro de Montevideo , 1865

Lautréamont only showed his childhood in Montevideo , himself as a poet and his school friend Georges Dazet clear reverence:

“The end of the nineteenth century will see its poet (shouldn't he start immediately with a masterpiece, but follow the law of nature); he was born on the shores of America, at the mouth of La Plata, where two peoples, once rivals, now strive to outstrip one another through material and moral progress. Buenos Aires, the queen of the south, and Montevideo, the coquette, shake hands of friends over the silver waters of the great estuary. But the eternal war has established its destructive rule over the country and is gleefully killing numerous victims. Farewell, old man, and remember me when you've read me. You, young man, do not be desperate; because in the vampire you have a friend, despite your contrary opinion. If you count the mite that causes the scabies, you have two friends! "(1st chant, 14th verse)

As a “second friend” in the first edition of 1868, Georges Dazet was named by his full name, with whom Ducasse had studied at the Lycée in Tarbes and whose father was his guardian, in the second edition the following year Dazet was only left "D", and in the complete edition Dazet was then completely omitted and replaced by "itch mite". The reason for this seems to have been that the friend protested against his name being mentioned after the appearance, which probably induced Ducasse to replace it with repulsive animal names in all places.

The friendship with George Dazet and lines like "I always have a shameful taste for pale schoolboys and sickly factory children" in the verse of the "pederasts" in the fifth song has led researchers to speculate about a possible homosexuality . Allusions to "the mouth full of leaves of the Belladonna" (II, 1) as evidence for drugs as well as assumptions that Lautréamont had a "delayed, catastrophic experience of puberty" (Franz Rauhut) or that he was later close to social revolutionary and anarchist circles, remained without evidence.

The most important influence on Ducasse's work was undoubtedly the Swiss philosopher Ernest Naville , whose lecture series “Le Problème du mal” (The Problem of Evil) was published as a book in Geneva in 1868. Naville listed three characteristics of "good", all of which appear in the chants of Maldoror : conscience (in the second stanza Maldoror murders the conscience he calls "the yellow ghost"), joy (Maldoror is joyless, first if he tries to force laughter in I, 5, then he confesses in IV, 2: "It is very difficult to learn to laugh") and finally order as the good of reason (Lautréamont expresses his admiration for the in the 2nd song Mathematics, whose “unswerving logic” and “extreme coldness” exist beyond good and evil). In a pessimistic understanding of the world, formulated according to the Christian pattern, according to which man is indeed created for good, but notices that he lives in the midst of evil and experiences his life as the prey of death, Naville urged man to resist. He described the praise of evil as the driving force of human endeavor on the way to purification. Lautréamont took precisely this development from his chants to the poésies : “I have denied my past. I only sing about hope. ”But to do this, he wrote in a letter to his father's banker, one must first attack“ the doubts of this century ”:“ Melancholy, grief, pain, despair, misery, gruesome whining, artificial malice, childish arrogance, silly curses. ”Naville's moral proof of God, which Lautréamont calls“ the strange thesis ”, had a decisive influence on the conception of his poésies .

Impact history

Alongside Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud , Lautréamont was the one who most decisively influenced modern poetry in the 20th century. He is one of the most important precursors of Surrealism and is often called its grandfather . He is considered to be the founder of the poetry of hallucinations and associations, of the unconscious , of automatic spelling and cross-border poetry. His work is based on Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire, on the night side of Romanticism and on Roman noir and touches on revolt , Satanism and language alchemy .

The success story of the Maldoror's chants is lengthy and tragic. The work only survived by a stroke of luck and was passed on to posterity only by chance. Isidore Ducasse had agreed to various changes to enable the publication of all six chants and to circumvent the censorship, but his early death prevented this compromise. The work was not made available to a larger audience until 1890, but its author did not live to see the publication.

19th century

During his lifetime Lautréamont received not the slightest attention apart from a brief review of the first song by Alfred Sircos in the magazine La Jeunesse on September 1, 1868 and a mention by Auguste Poulet-Malassis , the publisher of Baudelaire. Poulet-Malassis mentioned the book on October 25, 1869 in the Bulletin trimestriel des Publications défendues en France, imprimées à l'Estranger, where he counted Lautréamont "to the same rare genre as Baudelaire and Flaubert " and explained that the author probably believed “That the aesthetic portrayal of evil implies the strongest appreciation of the good, the highest moral.” In May 1870, the Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire only said “the book will probably find a place among the bibliographical curiosities”, otherwise nobody took it Notice of it.

Before the complete edition of 1869, which the publisher Lacroix had never delivered to the bookstores, could be crushed, the Brussels bookseller Jean-Baptiste Rozez bought the entire stock in 1874 and published Die Gesänge des Maldoror , with a new cover, that same year , four years after Lautréamont's death. The response was zero this time too.

Leon Bloy described the chants in 1890 as "the work of a madman, but also that of a great poet"

A decade after it was first published, the publisher of the Belgian literary magazine La Jeune Belgique , Max Waller, became aware of the book in 1885 and published the family's conversation from the first song in October 1885. He showed the chants to his friends, the Belgian writers Iwan Gilkin, Albert Giraud and Jules Destrée, who in turn recommended it to Joris Karl Huysmans , the master of decadence. Huysmans wrote to Destrée: “This is a very crazy talent, this Comte de Lautréamont ! (...) What the hell could the person who wrote these terrible dreams do in life? ”The following year, the Catholic innovator Léon Bloy reported in his autobiographical novel Le Désespéré (The Desperate) of the publication of a“ monstrous book that was written in Still unknown in France, but published in Belgium for ten years ”. In his article Le cabanon de Prométhée (The Hut of Prometheus, 1890), Bloy described the text as “a liquid lava of amazing, panicked beauty” and “the work of a madman, but also that of a great poet”. He called Lautréamont “Dear, great, failed man! Poor, noble impostor! "

In 1890 the chants were reissued. The publisher Léon Genonceaux incorporated biographical research into Lautréamont in his foreword, quoted from letters and even published a facsimile of letters to counter Boy's thesis about the author's madness.

In 1891 the French symbolist Remy de Gourmont finally discovered this new edition of the chants and became the first great advocate. On February 1, he bowed deeply to the author in Mercure magazine . He researched a copy of the first edition and wrote a precise comparative description of the work, but also discovered the only copy of the Poésies in the Paris National Library and published Lautréamont's birth certificate in the Mercure on November 1st . In his Le Livre des Masques (The Book of Masks - Glosses and documents on the literature of yesterday and today) he called him in 1896 "a young man of angry and unexpected originality and a sick, downright crazy genius". Remy de Gourmont also recommended the chants to the surrealism forerunner Alfred Jarry , who thereupon expressed his admiration for Lautréamont's pataphysical universe in his play Haldernablou (published July 1, 1894 in the "Mercure") and in other works and gave tribute to him in numerous quotations paid. Remy de Gourmont wrote the foreword for the new edition of 1920 in the Editions de La Sirène.

At the turn of the century, the Belgian writer and later Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck was enthusiastic about Lautréamont's poetry and praised it as a “model of the ingenious work”: “A black, shattered archangel of unspeakable beauty ... blinding flashes, violet and green ... metaphors in the flaming night of the Unconscious. ”And André Gide noted on November 23, 1905:“ I first quietly, then loudly, the incomparable VI. Read the song of Maldoror. By what coincidence did I not yet know him? Something like that inspires me to the point of ecstasy! "

After that Lautréamont fell into oblivion again.

surrealism

During the First World War, the French writer Philippe Soupault accidentally discovered an edition of the songs of Maldoror in the mathematics department of a small bookshop near the Paris hospital on the Rive Gauche , where he was housed in 1917 . In his memoirs he writes:

André Breton described Lautréamont's work in 1940 as an apocalypse
“I started reading when I was allowed to light a candle. It was like an enlightenment. In the morning I read the 'Gesänge' again, convinced that I would have dreamed ... The day after that André Breton visited me. I gave him the book and asked him to read it. He brought it back the following day, just as enthusiastic as I was. "

It was through this coincidence that Lautréamont revealed himself to the Surrealists , who quickly made him their prophet. This was the beginning of Lautréamont's triumphant advance. As one of the poètes maudits (the cursed poets) he was accepted into the surrealist pantheon alongside Baudelaire and Rimbaud. André Gide saw it as the greatest achievement of Aragon , Breton and Soupault to have "recognized and proclaimed the literary and ultra-literary significance of the astonishing Lautréamont". For Gide Lautréamont was - even more than Rimbaud - “the lock master of tomorrow's literature”.

Aragon and Breton copied the only copies of the Poésies in the Paris National Library and published the text in April and May 1919 in two consecutive issues of their magazine "Littérature", in 1925 Lautréamont became a special issue of the magazine Le Disque vert with the title Le cas Lautréamont ( Dedicated to the Lautréamont case. Many surrealist authors subsequently wrote texts and homage to Lautréamont.In 1940 André Breton included excerpts from the fourth and sixth chants as well as a letter from Lautréamont in his anthology of black humor and wrote in the introduction:

“This work (...) is the apocalypse. No matter how daring that one will think and undertake in the centuries to come, it has been formulated here in advance in his magical law. With Lautrèamont, language, just like style, falls into a serious crisis, it marks a new beginning. The limits have fallen within which words can relate to words, things can relate to things. A principle of constant transformation has taken hold of things as well as ideas and aims at their total liberation, which implies that of man. In this regard, Lautrèamont's language is an incomparable solvent and small plasma at the same time. "

In 1920 Man Ray took that famous passage from Canto 6 as the starting point for his work The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (The Secret of Isidore Ducasse), in which Lautréamont had described "the accidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table". The chants of Maldoror inspired numerous other visual artists: Frans De Geetere, Salvador Dalí , Jacques Houplain and René Magritte illustrated complete editions, later also Georg Baselitz . There are also individual works on Lautreamont by Max Ernst , Victor Brauner , Oscar Dominguez , Agustín Espinosa, André Masson , Joan Miró , Matta Echaunen , Wolfgang Paalen , Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy . Amedeo Modigliani always carried a copy of the “songs” that he quoted aloud on Montparnasse .

Albert Camus (1957) ranked Lautréamont among the sons of Cain a

Based on Lautréamont's "chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table", Max Ernst defined the structure of the surrealist image: "Accouplement de deux réalités en apparence inaccouplables sur un plan qui en apparence ne leur convient pas."

Félix Vallotton and Salvador Dalí made “imaginary” portraits of Lautréamont, as no photo of him had survived.

existentialism

Albert Camus classified Lautréamont among the representatives of the metaphysical revolt among the sons of Cain , together with the Marquis de Sade , with Nietzsche , Rimbaud and the Surrealists in his most existentialist work L'homme révolté (The Man in Revolt) . In the chapter La révolte métaphysique Camus interpreted the “Chants de Maldoror” as revenge on God, who is responsible for all evil, as a revolt against an absurd creation, against the rule of evil, which God marks as guilty because and when he is is omnipotent, and who denies him as almighty, since he allows evil against his will.

Camus recognizes in the Chants de Maldoror his own theme of absurdity. One of his main motives was the question of whether murder was not the consequence of absurd thinking ( Le meurtre et l'absurde ). The motto of his dramatic hero Caligula could therefore also be that of Maldoror. Freedom - this is the consequence of Maldoror and that of Caligula - can only be achieved by taking the lead in evil out of the hands of God or the gods. Freedom can only be achieved by surpassing the absurd through those who are affected by them, through their sacrifice, through people. (Erich Köhler: Lectures on the history of French literature. Freiburg 2006)

bibliography

Original editions

  • Les Chants de Maldoror - Chant premier. par ***, Imprimerie Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris, August 1868 (1st chant, published anonymously)
  • Les Chants de Maldoror - Chant premier. by Comte de Lautréamont, in: Parfums de l'Ame. Bordeaux 1869 (1st cant, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont)
  • Les Chants de Maldoror. A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, Brussels 1869 (first complete edition, not delivered)
  • Les Chants de Maldoror. Type. De E. Wittmann, Paris and Brussels 1874 (complete edition from 1869, with new cover)
  • Les Chants de Maldoror. Foreword by Léon Genonceaux, with a facsimile letter from Lautréamont, Ed. Léon Genonceaux, 1890 (new edition)
  • Les Chants de Maldoror. With 65 illustrations by Frans De Geetere, Ed. Henri Blanchetièr, Paris 1927
  • Les Chants de Maldoror. With 42 illustrations by Salvador Dalí ; Albert Skira Editeur, Paris 1934
  • Oeuvres Complètes. With a foreword by André Breton and illustrations by Victor Brauner , Oscar Dominguez , Max Ernst , Espinoza, René Magritte , André Masson , Joan Miró , Matta Echaunen , Wolfgang Paalen , Man Ray , Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy , GLM (Guy Levis Mano) , Paris 1938
  • Maldoror. With 27 illustrations by Jacques Houplain , Societe de Francs-Bibliophiles, Paris 1947
  • Les Chants de Maldoror. With 77 illustrations by René Magritte ; Editions De “La Boetie”, Brussels 1948
  • Œuvres complètes. Fac-similés des éditions originales. La Table Ronde, Paris 1970 (facsimiles of the original editions)
  • Œuvres complètes. based on the 1938 edition, with eight historical prefaces by Léon Genonceaux (Édition Genouceaux, Paris 1890), Rémy de Gourmont (Édition de la Sirène, Paris 1921), Edmond Jaloux (Edition Librairie José Corti, Paris, April 1938), Philippe Soupault (Edition Charlot, Paris, 1946) Julien Gracq (La Jeune Parque, Paris 1947), Roger Caillois (Edition Librairie José Corti 1947), Maurice Blanchot (Édition du Club Français du Livre, Paris 1949), Edition Librairie José Corti, Paris 1984
  • Poésies I. Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870
  • Poésies II. Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870

German translations

  • The complete work. The songs of Maldoror; Poetry (poetry); Letters. Translated from the French and with an afterword by Ré Soupault , with marginalia by Albert Camus , André Gide , Henri Michaux , Julien Gracq , Henry Miller , ER Curtius , Wolfgang Koeppen and others. a., Rowohlt, Reinbek 1963; Revised new edition, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1988 ISBN 3-498-03836-2
  • The songs of Maldoror. (Translation: Ré Soupault) Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-499-23547-1
  • The songs of Maldoror. Translated and with a study of the author and his work by Re Soupault. With 20 gouaches by Georg Baselitz . In the appendix - The dream as a construction principle in Lautreamont and Carroll by Elisabeth Lenk, Rogner & Bernhard, Munich. 1976
  • Complete works. German by Re Soupault. Rothe, Heidelberg 1954 (first German edition)
  • Works. The chants of Maldoror, poems, letters. Translation by Wolfgang Schmidt, Edition Sirene , Berlin 1985
  • Poetry. Foreword by Guy E. Debord and Gil J. Wolman. Translated by Pierre Gallissaires and Hanna Mittelstädt. With illustrations. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1979 ISBN 3-921523-38-9

Secondary literature

Foreign language

Web links