Les Chants de Maldoror


Les Chants de Maldoror is a French poetic novel, or a long prose poem. It was written and published between 1868 and 1869 by the Comte de Lautréamont, the nom de plume of the Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse. The work concerns the misanthropic, misotheistic character of Maldoror, a figure of evil who has renounced conventional morality.
Although obscure at the time of its initial publication, Maldoror was rediscovered and championed by the Surrealist artists during the early twentieth century. The work's transgressive, violent, and absurd themes are shared in common with much of Surrealism's output; in particular, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Philippe Soupault were influenced by the work. Maldoror was itself influenced by earlier gothic literature of the period, including Lord Byron's Manfred, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer.

Synopsis and themes

Maldoror is a modular work primarily divided into six parts, or cantos; these parts are further subdivided into a total of sixty chapters, or verses. Parts one through six consist of fourteen, sixteen, five, eight, seven and ten chapters, respectively. With some exceptions, most chapters consist of a single, lengthy paragraph. The text often employs very long, unconventional and confusing sentences which, together with the dearth of paragraph breaks, may suggest a stream of consciousness, or automatic writing. Over the course of the narrative, there is often a first-person narrator, although some areas of the work instead employ a third-person narrative. The book's central character is Maldoror, a figure of evil who is sometimes directly involved in a chapter's events, or else revealed to be watching at a distance. Depending on the context of narrative voice in a given place, the first-person narrator may be taken to be Maldoror himself, or sometimes not. The confusion between narrator and character may also suggest an unreliable narrator.
Several of the parts begin with opening chapters in which the narrator directly addresses the reader, taunts the reader, or simply recounts the work thus far. For example, an early passage warns the reader not to continue:
Apart from these opening segments, each chapter is typically an isolated, often surreal episode, which does not seem at first to be directly related to the surrounding material. For example, in one chapter, a funeral procession takes a boy to his grave and buries him, with the officiant condemning Maldoror; the following chapter instead presents a story of a sleeping man who is repeatedly bitten by a tarantula which emerges from the corner of his room, every night. Another strange episode occurs in an early chapter: the narrator encounters a giant glow-worm which commands him to kill a woman, who symbolizes prostitution. In defiance, the narrator instead hurls a large stone onto the glow-worm, killing it:
However, as the work progresses, certain common themes emerge among the episodes. In particular, there is constant imagery of many kinds of animals, sometimes employed in similes. For example, in one case, Maldoror copulates with a shark, each admiring the others' violent nature, while in another, the narrator has a pleasant dream that he is a hog. These animals are praised precisely for their inhumanity, which fits the work's misanthropic tone:
Another recurring theme among certain of the chapters is an urban–rural dichotomy. Some episodes take place in a town or city, while others occur at a deserted shore, with only a few actors. The juxtaposition of urban city scenes and rural shoreline scenes may be inspired by Ducasse's time in Paris and Montevideo, respectively. Other pervasive themes include homosexuality, blasphemy and violent crime, often directed against children.
Maldoror's sixth and final part instead employs a definite change in style, while retaining most of the themes already developed. The final part, intended as a "little novel" which parodies the forms of the nineteenth-century novel, presents a linear story using simpler language. In it, a schoolboy named Mervyn returns home to his well-to-do family in Paris, unaware that Maldoror had been stalking him. Maldoror writes Mervyn a love letter, requesting to meet, and Mervyn replies and accepts. Upon their meeting, Maldoror forces Mervyn into a sack, and beats his body against the side of a bridge, ultimately flinging the sack onto the dome of the Panthéon. This final, violent episode has been interpreted as a killing of the traditional novel form, in favor of Maldorors experimental writing.

Influence

Les Chants de Maldoror is considered to have been a major influence upon French Symbolism, Dada and Surrealism; editions of the book have been illustrated by Odilon Redon, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani was known to keep a copy of Maldoror available while traveling in the Montparnasse, sometimes quoting from it. Outsider artist Unica Zürn's literary work The Man of Jasmine was influenced by Maldoror; likewise, William T. Vollmann was influenced by the work.
Maldoror was followed by Poésies, Ducasse's other, minor surviving work, a short work of literary criticism, or poetics. In contrast to Maldoror, Poésies has a far more positive and humanistic tone, and so may be interpreted as a response to the former. For a more detailed treatment of Poésies, see the author's main article.
A theatrical adaptation titled "Maldoror" was co-produced by the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and the Mickery Theatre, and performed by the Camera Obscura experimental theatre company at La MaMa in the East Village of New York City in 1974. The text for the production was written by Camera Obscura and Andy Wolk, with design and direction by Franz Marijnen. "Maldoror" also went on tour in Europe in 1974.
Isidore Lucien Ducasse admitted to being inspired by Adam Mickiewicz and the form of The Great Improvisation from third part of the polish bard's Forefathers' Eve

English translations