Comte de Lautréamont

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Alleged portrait of Lautréamont

Lautréamont , also Comte de Lautréamont, pseudonym for Isidore Lucien Ducasse (born April 4, 1846 in Montevideo , Uruguay , †  November 24, 1870 in Paris ), was a French poet whose two only works, " The songs of Maldoror " and " Poésies " , to the literature of modernity and especially on the Surrealism exerted great influence.

Life

Lautréamont's life and the exact circumstances of his death had been in the dark for decades. Apart from his birth and death certificates and six letters, nothing was known about him. In the meantime, some data and marginalia have been researched, in 1977 even a photograph of him was found, in 1980 a seventh letter to Victor Hugo was discovered. Nevertheless, his biography is one of the great unknowns in literary history .

Little more is known about his life than that he was born in Montevideo in 1846 , later lived in Paris and died in a hotel at the age of 24. In 1868 he gave the manuscript of his Chants de Maldoror (“Die Gesänge des Maldoror”) to a publisher, who withdrew the book from the market as soon as it was printed. It did not appear until 1874, four years after Lautréamont's death.

The pseudonym Lautréamont , which Ducasse chose for the publication of his poetry in 1869 out of caution against censorship during the Second Empire in France, is taken from Eugène Sue's "Latréaumont", a popular gothic novel from 1837 with a blasphemous anti-hero . Lautréamont probably paraphrased the title as l'autre Amon (the other Amon - the angel of evil). According to another interpretation, it stands for "the other side of the river" ( l'autre Amont ).

youth

View over Montevideo to the Cerro de Montevideo , 1865

Isidore Lucien Ducasse was born on April 4, 1846, the son of the French consulate officer François Ducasse and his wife Jacquette-Celestine Davezac in Montevideo (Uruguay). Virtually nothing is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized in Montevideo Cathedral on November 16, 1847 , and that his mother died shortly afterwards, probably as a result of an epidemic. As a toddler, he experienced the eight-year siege of Montevideo during the Uruguayan civil war, and this exceptional situation may have had a lasting impact. Whether he later went to Alexandre Dumas d. Ä. The short story Montevideo, ou une nouvelle Troie (1850), which describes said conflict as a confrontation between the incarnation of evil (Argentina) and that of good (Uruguay), took note of and was even literarily influenced by it, is not known.

The boy grew up trilingual and spoke French, Spanish and English, which later enabled him to read accordingly. At the age of thirteen, Isidore was sent to high school in France by his father in October 1859, where he was to be trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes (Hautes-Pyrénées). There he managed the workload of two years in one and then from 1863 attended the Lycée Louis-Barthou in Pau (Aquitaine). In 1863/64 he took the classes rhetoric and philosophy (lower and upper prima) and excelled in arithmetic and drawing, but also already through extravagance in thinking and style. He read Edgar Allan Poe , devoured Percy Bysshe Shelley and especially George Gordon Byron , but also Adam Mickiewicz , John Milton , Robert Southey , Alfred de Musset , Charles Baudelaire . In class he was fascinated by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille , but above all by the scene of the dazzling in Sophocles ' " King Oedipus ". For an essay, which, according to the memories of his classmate Paul Lespès, he used "to show his obvious madness through the rampant use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible images of death" , he was arrested by his teacher Gustave Hinstin, which was the young Isidore should have taken a lot. After finishing school, he lived in Tarbes, where he became close friends with Georges Dazet, his guardian's son. He read a lot and decided to become a writer.

Years in Paris

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 the big boulevards , in a hotel at 23 rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and worked intensively on the first song of a prose poem , which he probably started before and during his crossing the ocean voyage had continued. The continued donations from his father enabled him to stay away from the social hustle and bustle of Paris and to devote himself entirely to his passion, writing. He was a frequent guest in the nearby libraries, inspired by the poems of the black romanticism , but also scientific works and encyclopedias , some of which he quoted verbatim.

The publisher Léon Genonceaux describes him as a “tall, dark, young man, beardless, restless, tidy and hardworking” and reports that Ducasse wrote “only at night on his piano” , “where he declaimed loudly, banged the keys wildly and always hammering out new verses to the sounds ” .

In the autumn of 1868 Ducasse published the first chant of the " Gesänge des Maldoror " ( Les Chants de Maldoror, Chant premier, par *** ) at his own expense and anonymously , a bold, taboo- breaking cantus about pain and cruelty at the same time but is an unprecedented text full of beauty, grandeur and grandeur. The book does not shy away from descriptions of the most extreme violent fantasies, such astonishing phenomena of evil are listed in it that it is considered one of the most radical works in Western literature.

On November 10, 1868, Isidore Ducasse sent a letter to the poet Victor Hugo , to which he enclosed two copies of the first song, and in which he asked him for a letter of recommendation for further publication. A new edition of the first song appeared at the end of January 1869 in Bordeaux in the anthology "Parfums de l'Ame". Isidore Ducasse used his pseudonym “Comte de Lautréamont” for the first time.

The complete edition of the total of six songs was to appear in the late summer of 1869 by Albert Lacroix in Brussels, who was also the publisher Eugène Sues . The edition was already in full print when Lacroix refused to deliver it to booksellers for fear of censorship . Ducasse saw the reason in the fact that "life is painted in too harsh colors." (Letter to the banker Darasse of March 12, 1870)

Ducasse urgently asked the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis , who had published Baudelaire's “ Flowers of Evil ” in 1857 , to send review copies to the literary critics, as they alone “judge the beginning of a publication which will certainly see its end later, 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)

Poulet-Malassis mentioned the book in a literary magazine that same month, otherwise almost no one took any notice of it. Only in the “Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire” was terse remark in May 1870 that “the book will probably find a place among the bibliographical curiosities” .

Early death

Lautréamont - “imaginary” portrait by Félix Vallotton

Ducasse had moved frequently since the spring of 1869 , moving from 3 rue du Faubourg-Montmartre in the 9th arrondissement to 15 rue Vivienne, after which he returned to rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and rented at 7 in a hotel. While he was still waiting for the "songs" to be delivered, Ducasse 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 .

In April and June 1870 Ducasse published in two small brochures, the Poésies I and II , the foreword to these planned "Songs of the Good", in which he differentiated the two parts of his work with the terms "Philosophy" and "Poésie" and under on the premise that the starting point of the struggle against evil is repentance, proclaimed:

“I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, wickedness with good, complaints with duty, skepticism with faith, sophisms with cool equanimity and arrogance with modesty " .

At the same time he took up texts by famous authors, reversed their meaning, corrected and even plagiarized them expressly: “Plagiarism is necessary. It's included in the progress. It gets to grips with an author's sentence, uses his expressions, crosses out a wrong idea, replaces it with the right idea. ” These included the“ Pensées ”of Blaise Pascal and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld , but also the work of La Bruyère and Vauvenargues , Dante , Kant and La Fontaine and even “improvements” to his own “chants”. The pamphlets of aphoristic prose had "no price", each subscriber could decide what amount he wanted to pay for them.

On July 19, 1870, Napoléon III declared . Prussia went to war , after the capture of Napoleon the siege of Paris began on September 19th , a situation Lautréamont knew from his childhood in Montevideo. During the siege, living conditions deteriorated rapidly, and Ducasse fell ill with a “vicious fever”, according to his hotelier.

Lautréamont died at the age of twenty-four on November 24, 1870 at eight o'clock in the morning in his hotel. On his death certificate was next to the life data: "No further information" . Since epidemics were feared in besieged Paris, Ducasse was buried in a makeshift grave on the Cimetière du Nord the next day after a service in the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette . His body was reburied in January 1871.

The songs of Maldoror

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

Lautréamont's poetry consists of six chants , which are divided into a total of sixty stanzas . In it Lautréamont created a world of images of infernal cruelty that broke all literary conventions of the 19th century. Maldoror, hero and first-person figure, is the ultimate incarnation of evil. As the "Sun of Evil" ( Aurore du Mal = Maldoror) he wages a battle against the human creature and God in various masks and metamorphoses . His goal is to surpass them in their badness.

Lautréamont does not follow any narrative rules and practices the first examples of automatic spelling . The passage in which Lautréamont describes the beauty of a young man using an apparently absurd metaphor that was later taken up by the surrealists has become famous : "He is as beautiful as the coincidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table!" (6 / 3)

Impact history

Like Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud , Lautréamont was an important precursor of Surrealism and is often called its "grandfather". He is considered the founder of the poetry of the unconscious , of association and hallucination, of automatic writing , of poetry that transcends all boundaries. He touches on satanism , revolt and linguistic alchemy, which are based on Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire, on the night side of romanticism and on roman noir . Lautréamont's themes have been compared to those of the Marquis de Sade and much later to Anthony Burgess' “ A Clockwork Orange ” .

During his lifetime Lautréamont, apart from a brief review of the first song by Alfred Sircos in the magazine “La Jeunesse” and a mention by Auguste Poulet-Malassis , the publisher of Baudelaire, received not the slightest attention after the publication of the six songs. The author had agreed to various changes in order to circumvent the censorship and enable the publication of the complete work, but his early death prevented this compromise. Ducasse did not live to see the show.

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. In 1890 the "Gesänge" were reissued. In his foreword, the publisher Léon Genonceaux incorporated research into Lautréamont's life in order to counter the thesis about the author's madness. In 1891 the French symbolist Rémy de Gourmont discovered this new edition and became its first advocate. After that Lautréamont fell into oblivion again.

Lautréamont's work only survived by a stroke of luck and was passed down to posterity by chance. During the First World War, the writer Philippe Soupault accidentally discovered an edition of the "Gesänge des Maldoror" in the mathematics department of a small bookshop near the Paris hospital on the Rive Gauche , where he was housed in 1917. This was the beginning of Lautréamont's triumphant advance. Because it was by chance that Lautréamont revealed himself to the Surrealists, who quickly made him their prophet. As one of the poètes maudits (the poet cursed by society) 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”.

1920 took Man Ray those now famous passage from the sixth song as a starting point for his work "The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse" (The Secret of Isidore Ducasse) in which Lautréamont "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table" described would have. “The songs of Maldoror” inspired numerous other visual artists: Frans De Geetere, Salvador Dalí , Jacques Houplain and René Magritte illustrated complete editions, and later Georg Baselitz . There are also individual works on Lautréamont by Max Ernst , Victor Brauner , Óscar Domínguez , Espinoza, André Masson , Joan Miró , Roberto Matta , Wolfgang Paalen , Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy . Amedeo Modigliani always carried a copy of the “songs” that he quoted aloud on Montparnasse . Félix Vallotton and Salvador Dalí made “imaginary” portraits of Lautréamont, as no photo of him had survived.

bibliography

Works by Lautréamont

  • 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 , par Comte de Lautréamont, in: "Parfums de l'Ame" (anthology, edited by Evariste Carrance), Bordeaux 1869 (1st chant, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont)
  • Les Chants de Maldoror , A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, Brussels 1869 (first complete edition, not delivered)
  • Poésies I , Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870
  • Poésies II , Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870
  • 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 and 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

German translations

  • Complete works . German by Ré Soupault (first German edition). Rothe, Heidelberg 1954
  • The complete work. The songs of Maldoror; Poetry (poetry); Letters. With an afterword by Ré Soupault and 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 . Translated from the French and with a study of the author and his work by Ré 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; again Heyne TB, 1981 (without gouaches)
  • Poetry . Foreword by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman. Translated by Pierre Gallissaires and Hanna Mittelstädt. With illustrations. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1979 ISBN 3-921523-38-9
  • Works. The chants of Maldoror, poems, letters. Translation by Wolfgang Schmidt, Edition Sirene, Berlin 1985
  • The complete work. The songs of Maldoror, poems (poésies), letters. From the French and with an afterword by Ré Soupault, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1988 ISBN 3-498-03836-2
  • Die Gesänge des Maldoror (translation: Ré Soupault) Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-499-23547-1

Secondary literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lautréamont, Comte de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ducasse, Isidor Lucien (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH Montevideo
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1870
Place of death Paris